I've been using CouchDB in my personal development and have recently
started trying to get up to speed with the project itself. I've
brought up a few issues on d...@couchdb.apache.org where I encountered
things that were a bit unsettling. There has been follow up
discussion, but no resolution and no one who can speak authoritatively
on where the line is on certain issues.
A recent patch introduced the source code of a BSD-licensed project
(erlang_oauth) into the CouchDB SVN. There was no mention of the
addition of the dependency in the patch and the license file for the
project was not included (which required including the license and
disclaimers). Digging a little more, I found that another non-ASL
code base (ibrowse) was added to the SVN in January, again with
missing license, no notice in the submission, traffic in the mailing
list. There is a third code base (mochiweb) that was in the source
during incubation which was noted in the April 2008 board report:
On Apr 14, 2008, at 11:07 AM, Noel J. Bergman wrote:
....
=== CouchDB ===
CouchDB is a distributed document-oriented database system written in
Erlang. The project entered incubation on February 12th, 2008.
The infrastructure (SVN, JIRA, mailing lists, and web-site) has been
set up,
and the team has moved source, documentation, and bug reports from
their
former homes to the ASF.
Work has continued on removing code forked from other projects from
the
CouchDB codebase. This includes Mozilla !SpiderMonkey, the code for
which
was previously included with CouchDB in slightly modified form.
Instead, it
is now treated as an external compile-time dependency via a custom C
wrapper
using the !SpiderMonkey API. Also, work is currently in progress on
replacing the dependency on a forked version of `inets`, which is
part of
the Erlang standard library (EPL), with the MIT-licensed !MochiWeb
library.
For the time being, the !MochiWeb code is included in the CouchDB
codebase,
mostly because there has been no official release of that library yet.
That point indicated that the direction was to remove external
codebases from the CouchDB source tree. The mochiweb and ibrowse have
slightly diverged from the base project, so in essence (but not likely
in intent) CouchDB has forked those projects.
I requested that the erlang_oauth commit be reverted until we had a
clarification, but no action has been taken.
The second issue is that there seemed to be a recurring pattern of
significant contributors using Github for feature branches. This
raised the possibility of the resulting patch not being the work of a
single individual and also removed the development history from the
archives.
I reported these issues in the following threads:
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c8f366a4d-a8d0-44d1-a9d2-4f067f386...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c98e3034d-2595-4fbe-ae6e-991affa64...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c29420cca-62bf-424e-a03d-6b376a0d9...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c399a2534-fbbb-4d0e-a7c9-a04ab0e17...@apache.org%3e
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/200908.mbox/%3c00d13141-2cee-42b2-87ce-81fba695e...@apache.org%3e
The current question is:
On Aug 8, 2009, at 1:39 PM, Paul Davis wrote:
..
Maybe its just me but I haven't the slightest what problem this thread
is trying to solve. Why would we even think about removing our runtime
dependencies from SVN? I know someone suggested it in thread this
conversation forked from but I never read discussion about why this
would be good or necessary.
I'm having problems pointing to a definitive statement that says that
these are things that an Apache project doesn't do, but am struggling
to come up with anything definitive.
I would appreciate review of these threads and appropriate
participation from the Incubator PMC.
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