On Tue, Jun 24, 2014, at 12:02 PM, Christian Grobmeier wrote: > On 24 Jun 2014, at 7:24, Roman Shaposhnik wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 6:22 AM, Christian Grobmeier > > <grobme...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I think its not enough to just look at release / committer additions. > >> > >> In the case of Wave, there was a committer addition in the past year. > >> Still > >> no commits, nor a release. Looking closer you would find that > >> committer was > >> added because there was some excitement around at that time, with a > >> lot of > >> plans. > >> But then people were facing simply too much work for a small team, > >> and > >> the motivation then stopped. A deadline wouldn't not help to get out > >> a > >> release. > >> > >> That being said, I would like to re-suggest my initial thought with > >> one > >> modification: > >> > >> - no new committer for a year > >> - AND no release for a year > >> - AND less than 20 emails in a month on dev@ > >> - AND less than 10 commits/jira modifications in a month > >> - AND no way to change this in the next three months (in example: > >> hackathon > >> on horizon) > > > > Here's my personal struggle with two of the items on this list: > > - AND less than 20 emails in a month on dev@ > > - AND less than 10 commits/jira modifications in a month > > I can't fathom how a community that is that active can't put > > itself to a task of making a release. > > Let's assume the Wave project would have more activity. Maybe lets say > they are operating with around 20 commits a month. It would be still > difficult to release the code base within one year, because its really > complex and > needs a full refactoring. If we do not weight activity in general in, we > reduce > the exit criteria to: how fast can you do a release? > > And: if you don't manage to make a release in the first year - no matter > how your > product looks like - you might be thrown out. > > > > At the ends of the day, the release of an incubating project > > is NOT a glorious exercise in putting the final coat of paint > > on a flawless product. It is rather a very mundane way sharing > > technology with its users community. And after all, growing the > > user community is as important as growing the contributing > > community. It is only fair that IPMC gently reminds PPMC of that. > > I agree, but sometimes it's simply not possible to release. > Actually, Wave *could* have released something, but nobody wants > it to look like that. > > Let's assume they would release it now, which would be possible in > theory. > Let's say they would get 3 +1 from the PMC, which will be hard already. > Then you have a released project, but the community is almost inactive. > > > Heck, our TLPs practice it (where expectations are arguably > > higher) let alone Incubating projects. Take Hadoop as an > > example -- in order to make Hadoop 2.x successful the > > community decided to put an early alpha releases of > > Hadoop 2.0.x out to share the technology with its users. > > It was exactly the right decisions and ultimately it resulted > > in a much smoother 2.x.y series. > > As to my knowledge, some Hadoop-devs get financial support from > companies. > Projects like Ripple, Wave or Log4cxx do not have that financial > support. > In most cases, people work on these codebases in their prime time. > For that reason I don't want to compare company-backed projects with > prime-time projects. > > > In short -- you don't have to make your releases GA. Alpha > > releases are just fine. Still you have to demonstrate that > > you are capable of sharing your work with the user > > community and doing an alpha/beta/gamma/YNH release > > is the only way to do it. > > I know what you mean, but I doubt this alone is a factor we should > weight for an exit. > > People might struggle with a release but be healthy otherwise. > People might get a release done, but have no community otherwise. > > That said, reminding people of the "release often and early" thing is > good to do, > but also have in mind that incubator releases are very difficult to > make.
Unlike Christian (another Wave mentor :-) ), I am generally in support of this proposal. If a project cannot get a release out, then it suggests insufficient weight behind it. Releasing software is what the ASF is about. It is acceptable that a mature ASF project, one that is code-complete, doesn't release regularly, but an incubator project would not fall into that camp, therefore being able to say "we can muster the resources to make a 'legally valid release' within a year seems eminently reasonable to me. Upayavira --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
