The way I look at release reviews is that releases are the things that
expose the Apache Foundation to the greatest legal risk, so it's
critical that podlings learn to get them right. If they (podlings)
don't get releases right in the incubator, what chance is there that
they will succeed as a PMC?
Technical review can only be done by folks who are knowledgeable about
the code base. These are the committers on the project. Process review
can be done by mentors. Ideally, license and notice reviews should be
done first by mentors. But I don't expect that mentors will
necessarily know as much as people in IPMC (and other volunteer
release reviewers) about the legal requirements for release.
From my perspective, even though it is at times painful, the release
process works well. Everyone in the incubator contributes what they
can to make sure that podlings learn how to release, and how important
it is to release clean code. Even if the code doesn't work, the
process does.
Craig
On Jan 12, 2013, at 11:29 AM, Joe Schaefer wrote:
Yes you make a good point- that any effort
towards review is welcome and appreciated.
It's just that having an exclusive focus
on the things we can actually review here,
namely adherence to License and Notice policy,
can leave people with the mistaken impression
that that's all that a PMC should concern itself
with. All of that daily effort that goes into
validating commits on a project really should
garner more appreciation from the PMC, if we
could just find a way to be more trusting about
who we let issue binding votes on behalf of
the org.
Really is it so bad to say to a project with
a bug in their license and notice info: fix
this in trunk and show me the revision and
I'll go ahead and approve your release as-is.
Running through iterations of this is very
labor-intensive for the project, and anything
we can do to cut down on the pain involved
in cutting incubator releases is IMO worthwhile.
________________________________
From: Sergio Fernández <sergio.fernan...@salzburgresearch.at>
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Cc: Joe Schaefer <joe_schae...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 12, 2013 2:22 PM
Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Expressing priorities about release reviews
Joe,
personally I appreciate such policies checking from the IPMC
members. The technical quality of a release is responsibility of
the project itself, which could be hard to be evaluated by people
working on other topics. Therefore, all additional checkpoints are
useful and grateful.
Cheers,
On 12/01/13 18:07, Joe Schaefer wrote:
One of my long time pet peeves with how we
PMC members participate in vetting releases
is our penchant for focusing too much on the
policies surrounding license and notice info.
I really think our exclusive focus on things
that really don't pose any organizational risk
to either the org nor the project participants
serves us well in our other, often unexpressed
but far more relevant, goals about encouraging
committers to participate in active review of
their project's commit activity.
Just think about this for a second, what's more
likely for people to start suing us over, some
bug in the NOTICE file or an undetected backdoor
in one of our programs? I am personally far more
concerned about the current state of the actual
review going on in our podlings than I am about
NOTICE minutia.
Maybe we should compile some list of which committers
are actually subscribed to their project's commit lists?
It's crude but it may be useful data to look at to
a first order.
-- Sergio Fernández
Salzburg Research
+43 662 2288 318
Jakob-Haringer Strasse 5/II
A-5020 Salzburg (Austria)
http://www.salzburgresearch.at
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Craig L Russell
Architect, Oracle
http://db.apache.org/jdo
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P.S. A good JDO? O, Gasp!
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