On 27 May 2012 10:40, Jukka Zitting <jukka.zitt...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi, > > On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 6:29 AM, Arvind Prabhakar <arv...@apache.org> > wrote: > > > > > > I don't think this is a problem because while most Cloudera committers > have > > the luxury of working on the project during regular working hours, others > > do that during their off hours. Hence the majority of contributions > coming > > from Cloudera. > > OK, fair enough. > > Such a scenario exists or has existed also in other Apache projects > like Jackrabbit that I'm most familiar with. It can be a tricky > balance to maintain a level playing field in such cases, for example > by making sure that all relevant project discussions happen out in the > open and that some committers don't feel like "junior partners" with > less ability to influence the project. > > Same for tomcat, Maven, etc. The presence of FTEs may increase code quantity and quality, but it does make things a bit more exclusionary for the part time developer who have a primary day job and some spare time fixes/features & projects to work on.
Is that a bad thing? I don't know. I'm typing this in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux -a lot of volunteers and FTEs have made this laptop usable. I cherish that, and don't care that much about the dynamics of the various projects I depend on: kernel, gnome. firefox, glipper, ... they work and are free. > It sounds like you have a reasonably good handle on that, so I'm not > too worried, but my instinct suggests that the strict RTC model and > distinction between committers and (P)PMC members may be structural > factors that could easily end up tripping that balance. Are these > really essential tools for the project or could you live without them? > Other solutions to the RTC model include separate maintenance branches > with stricter review and testing requirements, and the only cases > where I really see a need for the committer/(P)PMC separation is with > umbrella projects or special cases like GSoC students or co-operation > across project boundaries. > > +1. RTC stops me doing little things in Hadoop like fixing typos in comments and variable names, puts so much inertia in the patches I wrote when I was only working on it in my copious free time, that I have had to create a spreadsheet to track the status, and continually try to resync those patches with the current codebase, resubmit, etc, etc. I see the rationale, but think it makes a project significantly less agile, as well as acting as a barrier to part time devs.
