All, I agreed to take on the work to clean up the incubator policies and procedures. I spent a good amount of time last week going through our documents and going through the foundation wide documents. I'll summarize the issues I saw into three broad categories:
- Incubator policies that duplicated, almost verbatim, foundation wide policies - Incubator policies that created cyclic loop, e.g. Page 1 Section 3 pointed to Page 2 Section 5 which pointed back to Page 1 Section 3. - Incubator policies that were duplicated, often in a contradictory fashion, other incubator policies. You can see my initial pass at cleaning this up by going to this revision: http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?view=revision&revision=1776060 and this revision http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=1776061&view=rev. Its all up on a branch until we're in agreement that it's good to go, in which case it can be pushed on to trunk. By doing this work, I was able to eliminate the following guides: - Committer (the foundation wide provided the same information, in addition to what we list in roles and responsibilities) - PMC (this was almost a direct copy of mentor, or mentor a copy of it, not sure which) - Release Management (these documents were all direct copies of foundation wide procedures). The one call out on this one is the 2013 alternate release voting. I'm not sure anyone has actually used it, and I'm not sure if we should still maintain it. Here are some of the major changes: - Incubator Policy & Roles and Responsibilities had a lot of cross linking between themselves. I removed all notions of roles out of incubation policy and instead used a link to roles and responsibilities to provide all of the information. - With the exception of committers, roles and responsibilities has no outbound links. It is now the consolidate source of truth of what everyone's role is. - Incubation Policy has had the "assessment" section removed and replaced with quarterly reports. I'm not sure if they were intended to be the same thing or not, or if its a practice that stopped within the incubator but it seems that the quarterly reports provide the same feedback. - Old version of policy put much of the podling creation on mentors, new version clarifies that infra actually does the work, guided by the mentors on the steps they require. Also added a link to a comdev/infra page on how to request a podling. - Clarified the use of IP Clearance and SGAs. - Branding section clarified with the incubator specific requirements (summary of the branding page) - Same for releases. - Removed release requirements that were labeled as "podling only" since they were actually foundation wide requirements. - Updated graduation requirements, mostly for readability. - In areas that referenced SVN, also mentioned git. - In mentor section, added the explicit work for creating podling. Added link for JIRA requests. - In PPMC, added a note about combined committer and PPMC role, clarified notice email to better align to board format. - Removed editing your project's status page from PPMC, its covered elsewhere. Please take a look, start to comment on what you see. And sorry for the long email! John
