BZZZT, BZZZT, the above statement presumes that "release" and "publication" are one and the same. The distinction between a vote to "release" and a vote to "publish" is in my option an import aspect of active community based decision making. Communities vote to release, and PMCs demonstrate responsible oversite through control of “publication. The people who care about the subject make a collective decision to release something. That decision is not binding on Apache. All it does is establish a recommendation to a PMC to publish. A PMC can then endorce (or not) a release recommendation by the community.
well, sure. Totally agree. You've got the roles and responsibilities right.
In theory.
In practice, such an approach is way too cumbersome. The PMC is supposed to be at least a substantial subset of the development community. Meaning the same people would vote twice on the same thing. Something, by the way, which in a healthy community is usually not controversial at all.
So, we start with your picture of roles and responsibilities and then we streamline the process a bit. We usually roll all those votes into one, put in place a release manager, etc etc.
Or, you might say, we implement the community vote to release by lazy consensus, and we might do so for the choice of release manager as well.
Natural thought: "lets make the PMC vote lazy consensus as well". And there is a problem. Can't do that. Legal oversight, bylaws, accountability, etc etc. So the PMC must always hold the publication vote.
But, since we've made the "release" vote subject ot lazy consensus, and since the only "publication" vote a PMC holds is on the publication of "releases", lets make "publication vote" into synonymous to "release vote".
And there you have it steve: we're actually in agreement! There's really no need for you to BZZZT here.
This approach reflects a respect for the *decisions* of the community while delivering the appropriate due-diligence by the responsible PMC.
Respect for the decisions by the community from the PMC had better be implicit and it had better generally be known to all participants that the respect is there. If this is not crystal clear to all, what you have is a screwed-up community.
cheers!
- Leo
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