Single committer podlings (was Re: draft proposal for Caitrin)

[Martijn Dashorst]

On 5/7/08, Roland Weber <ossfwot@...> wrote:
> Martijn Dashorst wrote:
>  The Proposal Guide says "Apache is interested
>  only in communities." but that is not policy.

This is meant as: "Apache is interested only in communities as opposed
to just code." This is to prevent code dumps into Apache svn. It is
perfectly fine to grow a community inside the incubator. It just takes
a while when you start with nothing.

> > However, starting without committers is a really hard thing. You have
> > to publicize the heck out of it.
>
>  And spend a lot of time learning about "The Apache Way".
>  Getting the podling up to speed is no small task for a
>  single person, even if mentors help with it.

Well, I think it is beneficial to start with nothing in this regard.
There are no wrong assumptions and processes in an empty list of
committers. :-) You can learn it the right way without having to
unlearn.


> > I think that one of the goals of the incubator is to grow podlings to
> > the point that they can manage themselves.
>
>  I'm concerned about the starting point from which to grow.
>  Apache committers have the Labs to get started and attract
>  a few interested people before coming to the Incubator.
>  A non-committer coming to the Incubator directly faces a
>  really steep learning curve.

But that is why the incubator is here. There just needs to be enough
interest in the podling to get accepted in the incubator. From there
everything else follows. If there is no champion, sponsor or mentor
available the podling won't start. And these conditions will only
become available when someone has an interest in the podling.

Martijn

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[Angela Cymbalak]

I must say that this thread has become a very interesting read...

At 04:56 PM 5/7/2008, you wrote:

><snip>
> >
> >  And spend a lot of time learning about "The Apache Way".
> >  Getting the podling up to speed is no small task for a
> >  single person, even if mentors help with it.
>
>Well, I think it is beneficial to start with nothing in this regard.
>There are no wrong assumptions and processes in an empty list of
>committers. :-) You can learn it the right way without having to
>unlearn.

+1

I could attempt to start Caitrin as an open source project on my own
and probably do pretty well with it and keep it as a goal to join
with the ASF.  However, then the community would have to relearn
everything when joining with ASF.  I'd rather learn it from the
ground up the right way than have to unlearn something.

> >
> >  I'm concerned about the starting point from which to grow.
> >  Apache committers have the Labs to get started and attract
> >  a few interested people before coming to the Incubator.
> >  A non-committer coming to the Incubator directly faces a
> >  really steep learning curve.
>
>But that is why the incubator is here. There just needs to be enough
>interest in the podling to get accepted in the incubator. From there
>everything else follows. If there is no champion, sponsor or mentor
>available the podling won't start. And these conditions will only
>become available when someone has an interest in the podling.

There is an extremely large learning curve but everyone starts
somewhere right?  If you have people willing to show you the ropes
(mentors) and someone who believes in the project (a champion) and
the drive to see through your project, then that learning curve is
made manageable.  I just don't have the guts to do what the JSecurity
group did and outright ask to recruit a Champion on the list.  I am
hoping that one of the members takes an interest as I am working on things.

Angie



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[lhazlewood]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 8:33 PM, Angela Cymbalak <a.cymbalak@...>
wrote:

> >
> > >  I'm concerned about the starting point from which to grow.
> > >  Apache committers have the Labs to get started and attract
> > >  a few interested people before coming to the Incubator.
> > >  A non-committer coming to the Incubator directly faces a
> > >  really steep learning curve.
> >
> > But that is why the incubator is here. There just needs to be enough
> > interest in the podling to get accepted in the incubator. From there
> > everything else follows. If there is no champion, sponsor or mentor
> > available the podling won't start. And these conditions will only
> > become available when someone has an interest in the podling.
> >
>
> There is an extremely large learning curve but everyone starts somewhere
> right?  If you have people willing to show you the ropes (mentors) and
> someone who believes in the project (a champion) and the drive to see
> through your project, then that learning curve is made manageable.  I just
> don't have the guts to do what the JSecurity group did and outright ask to
> recruit a Champion on the list.  I am hoping that one of the members takes
> an interest as I am working on things.

Hi Angie,

I'm not sure that it took 'guts' on our part - we were just following the "A
Guide to Proposal Creation" to a T.  The very first thing it says is to do
is join this list, read the archives and podling/incubator documentation and
then recruit a Champion that could help us through the process, even before
we started on our proposal.  So, we just started with step 1 and are waiting
to see if we can get a Champion.  If so, then we get to move on to step 2 ;)
 We're of course looking for mentors too, but we're just (perhaps naively)
following the guide as requested.

JSecurity might be a little different than your situation though, which
isn't a bad thing of course, its just our paths might not overlap.  Our
codebase is almost 4 years old, with active development for the last 3 years
from 5 current committers.  We worked to build up a community over the last
two years while continually improving the code and adding functionality.  In
the last 6 months, we've seen a large increase in activity, both from a
coding standpoint as well as adoption rate, so we knew that we were on the
verge of the 'next level' for the project.

So, our next train of thought was "wow, things have really taken off the
last year - we've got a good architecture and codebase that is used in many
commercial and open source products, and we've got solid interest from the
community.  Lets see if we can take it as far as it can go."

After good discussion among the committers, we decided that entry into the
ASF would be symbiotic for both our community in fostering new adoption and
better support as well as for the ASF in acquiring a project that is very
different from anything they currently have and could prove to be quite
useful in many ASF projects.  We knew there can be a high barrier to entry
in becoming an ASF project, so we wanted to make sure we 'had our stuff
together' before trying.  We feel we're at that point, at least enough to be
a podling.

I don't know anything about Caitrin or if it has similarities to our
project, and I'm certainly not suggesting you follow our same path, but that
was our history and thought process leading up to wanting to be a part of
the ASF.  I figured if that gave you any insight to what might be useful or
informed potential mentors on this list, it would be worth writing about.
 Now we'd love to find our Champion :)

Regards, and good luck with Caitrin,

Les

[Roland Weber]

Hi Angela,

Angela Cymbalak wrote:
> There is an extremely large learning curve but everyone starts somewhere
> right?  If you have people willing to show you the ropes (mentors) and
> someone who believes in the project (a champion) and the drive to see
> through your project, then that learning curve is made manageable.

If you feel like it, by all means go for it! Btw, the alternative
I recommended was not to start outside of Apache, but as part of
an existing project :-) No danger of having to unlearn everything.
But somebody who will write the board reports for you ;-)

> I
> just don't have the guts to do what the JSecurity group did and outright
> ask to recruit a Champion on the list.  I am hoping that one of the
> members takes an interest as I am working on things.

I'd say that you are already asking, but you are potentially
missing parts of the target audience because the subject of
your mail doesn't say so. Not every subscriber is reading
every mail that's posted to this list. If you feel like
coming to the Incubator, then you will have to search for
a Champion. Since you already have ties with Roller, maybe
you should ask here and on a Roller list.

cheers,
   Roland


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