Greetings, On August 28th, the Allura podling presented a release candidate to this list. Three weeks later, the VOTE was still open, and three of four Allura Mentors still had not been heard from.
It so happens that the wayward Mentors all have illustrious reputations and exceptional records of contributing to the ASF. They include: * A current ASF Board member, past ASF President and ASF Board Chair. * A current ASF Board member and past ASF Board Chair. * The current ASF President. Should those individuals have skipped the monthly Board meeting to make time for Allura? Presumably not. And yet, how is it acceptable for a release vote -- which ought to take 72 hours -- to last for three weeks? Dave Brondsema and Cory Johns are two of Allura's core developers. With the help of the Incubator but largely through their own effort, they have become conversant with Apache intellectual property policy and release criteria. Their expertise exceeds that of most PMC members across all Apache TLPs. Furthermore, Dave and Cory are deeply invested in their project's future and intimately familiar with its code base. A vote by Dave or Cory to release Allura is ten times more meaningful than a vote by any Mentor, and a hundred times more meaningful than a vote by a "freelance" IPMC member who doesn't even read Allura's dev list -- let alone the commits list. But we don't count such votes. The Incubator has a fundamental structural flaw: it lacks a mechanism to reward merit earned by individual podling contributors. Instead, we teach people to hate the Incubator by placing their projects at the mercy of Mentors. Our Mentors care, but they don't care enough. They don't care like core developers care. The Incubator's system for approving releases is at odds with everything we believe at Apache about self-governance. It produces inferior releases, an inferior incubation experience, inferior students and an inferior ASF. We should change it. Marvin Humphrey --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
