On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 10:18 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (3980)
<chris.a.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> I’ll note that the only person I see from infra that has been proposed
> in the current PMC is Jake Ferrel:
>
> * Acquia: Jake Farrell
>
> Someone also correct me in that I don’t think Jake is a paid infra
> contractor.
>
> In addition the way I see this is that it is no different e.g.,
>
> than contributing upstream to FreeBSD or whatever - Infra contractors
> may fix something and decide it’s in the ASF’s best interests to
> contribute it upstream - same may happen for Whimsy. But to date,
> ASF infra folk that are contractors I believe are not proposed to
> be directly paid to contribute to Whimsy. Should they do so, great.
> But in the famous words of Sam Ruby let’s deal with this if there
> is an actual data point instead of hypotheticals.
>

I apologize for the double post.
Yes, infra frequently submits patches to upstream projects.
We also maintain our own set of patches for software that we use.
And we write a decent amount of software. gitpubsub, all of the github
integration, CMS, etc.

Earlier this year, I was looking at what needed to be prioritized from
an allocation of people.  I spoke about a number of things with Ross
and Rich, commented about conversations I had had earlier in 2014
about Whimsy. The timesaving and workflow benefits to exec officers
and board members was emphasized.
To be perfectly explicit - since mid-January - Dan Norris, a paid
infra contractor, has been focused on Whimsy, the secretary workbench,
etc. Some of that time has been understanding how things work today,
defining a plan on making Whimsy better supported, improving
monitoring ability, getting us closer aligned to how we want software
to be deployed, and dealing with feature requests.

And here is where my conflict comes in.

With my VP Infra hat on, assuming there are no objections, my plan is
to continue to task Dan Norris with that work. Whimsy is important to
the operation of the foundation; and people come to infra when it
isn't working. As long as those two remain true, Whimsy will remain
something that I allocate folks time to, and in the case of Dan, I
plan on allocating the bulk of his time there.

With my ASF member/Board member hat on, I see this as the Foundation
deciding that a project is important to the Foundation; and despite
the fact that 'we don't pay for development' and that 'we pick runners
not winners', we've effectively decided that this TLP is worth
expending money on development for. That does worry me from a
precedent standpoint. Is there a difference in us allocating developer
time to a TLP as opposed to a codebase in the private infra svn tree?
There are some; whether they matter or not remains a question.
We don't release internal software. We don't brand it as Apache $foo.

If this path is good for whimsy, it might be good for other projects
infra has as well that are primarily written (now) by infra
contractors. Gitpubsub, svngit2jira, etc. but could be used more
widely.

--David

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