Hi Craig, On Feb 5, 2014, at 9:05 AM, Craig L Russell <craig.russ...@oracle.com> wrote:
>> Hi Craig, >> >> Thanks for the list, I’m following up with these folks to get them accounts. >> I think some people filed an ICLA but never received an account and were >> thus never added to the repo. > > This is a significant failure of the leadership of this project to request > accounts. > > The project status on http://incubator.apache.org/projects/spark.html says > that "all active committers have submitted a contributors agreement" as of a > week ago. The project started seven months ago. Setting up the project, > filing ICLAs, and getting accounts for committers is supposed to be part of > the initial activities, not a graduation exercise. There was definitely a failure here in setting up their expectations and following up to make sure everyone got an account. All the committers who sent an ICLA requested an account name, but I at least wasn’t clear what the process is for getting one (I assumed that secretary@ does that, since as a non-IPMC member, I can’t create accounts). We also didn’t tell the new committers to ask if they haven’t received an account in X time, so because people were immediately added on the private list they might’ve thought everything is under way. But we can definitely take a much more proactive stance on this as a TLP. I would both 1) tell them to expect an account within a week and 2) make sure the PMC leads this process for new committers. As you must’ve seen from our discussion with secretary@, all the proposed committers actually had submitted ICLAs, and the only one you hadn’t received one from was Kay Ousterhout due to spam filtering. She was only added in December. If you look at the VOTE threads or GitHub review activity, all the added committers were highly active members in terms of both new contributions and reviewing before being proposed as committers. >> A couple of questions: >> >> - What do you mean by “does not appear to be a committer” — that they >> weren’t added to the repo? > > They were not given credentials to commit to the repo. > >> All of these individuals have contributed code, but it was merged by someone >> else. > > This is a major issue. At Apache, committers update the repo with their own > code. Occasionally, they commit code on behalf of others but this should be a > rare exception, such as a person from the outside contributing a patch or two. > > If committers on the project are routinely committing patches on behalf of > other active members of the project, there is something fundamentally wrong > with the leadership of the project. What I meant by this is that all code is reviewed by another committer and merged by them. Different projects operate differently, but I believe this is a very normal way to operate. I’ve been a committer on Apache Hadoop, one of the most active Apache projects, since 2009, and nearly all the patches I sent there were reviewed and merged by someone else. If you look at the GitHub code reviews (https://github.com/apache/incubator-spark/pulls), you’ll see that lots of people are contributing to reviewing. But I agree that the new committer onboarding process should include having them do a test commit. > Perhaps it is a feature of using git that it's so easy to write code, create > a pull request, and have someone else do the "easy" job of merging. That might definitely be part of it. GitHub not only makes it easy to send patches but also makes it easy for the reviewer to say “this patch does not merge cleanly”, or “does not pass unit tests”, so a lot of the merging happens at review time. The actual merging is a couple of shell commands. You can look at some of the pull requests if you’re worried about peoples’ activity — discussion is extremely active and many of our proposed committers were reviewing patches before being proposed. > >> - Andrew Xia is listed as having an ICLA on file here: >> http://people.apache.org/committer-index.html > > Yes, I missed this. Andrew's public name is different. > > There are some folks on the proposed PMC list who do not appear to have been > active on the mail lists, which are the life blood of a project. It’s true that some members have been less active in the past six months, but keep in mind that the project existed for 3.5 years before joining the Incubator, and was highly active even then. All the initial committers made major contributions during these first 3.5 years, and as Chris said, our philosophy was to recognize them for their contributions and give them the ability to participate in the project once it moved to Apache. All of the initial committers agreed to being made committers (I asked them before the proposal). If we end up with a problem of inactive committers in the future, we may consider some kind of emeritus status, but I’d personally feel uncomfortable asking anyone to drop their committer status due to the past six months when they’ve been participating in the project for 2+ years. > I'm still -1 on this project graduating without demonstrated understanding of > how Apache projects work. If you still have specific concerns after reading the discussion above and looking at some of the reviewing process, let me know. As Chris said, I believe we operated the project very closely to the Apache spirit even before submitting it to the incubator. Some specific examples: - Out of the proposed committers, myself, Patrick Wendell, Tom Graves, Bobby Evans, Thomas Dudziak, and Andy Konwinski were already committers on other Apache projects before joining Spark. (I might be missing others, these are the ones I have off the top of my head). - All activity and review has always been done electronically through email and GitHub. Even for people who sat in the same room (the Berkeley contributors), we did all reviews online. Contributors from throughout the community routinely participate in these reviews. - Our review process closely matches Apache Hadoop’s, which most of us were familiar with. - We chose the initial committer set to include a wide range of organizations, and have continued to do so in the new committers added since incubation. - We’ve done not just minor tweak releases, but two major releases, our largest to date, through the Apache process. In these releases, the VOTE process worked as intended, often finding bugs and packaging issues, fixing the artifacts, etc. In any case, we appreciate that you are checking these things thoroughly, and we realize that from the infrastructure point of view we haven’t done a great job onboarding people. But I believe we can easily start doing this as a TLP, perhaps more easily now that more members of the project will be able to carry on these tasks. Matei --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
