Friday, October 26, 2007

How to become an Apache committer

I knew there are different possibilities to become an Apache projects committer. In some cases, you've got to earn it hard, in other cases its easier.

Recently I have learned the easiest way, though: You simply have to be the member of the right project. In my case this would be RAT or Plexus. Done nothing, and having two more entries on the profile.

But while we are at it, in it's extremely good that these are joining the ASF. Or should I say "coming home"? I never understood Roberts decision to build RAT at Google. At least, I was unable to see any advantages. Yet another bug tracker to learn, another code repository to maintain, and a completely different way of releasing distributables. Same goes for Plexus at Codehaus. I agree that it makes sense to host the Mojo project at Codehaus: In that case it is most possibly more important that new developers can easily be added.

In both cases, I am personally happy about the decision. In the case of RAT, this will make it much easier to integrate the RAT core and the rat-maven-plugin. And if Plexus will be called Apache Composer, then I'll possibly be able to use it in projects at work as a lightweight alternative to Spring. (It is always easier to ask for use of "Apache Something", compared to "sf.net/projects/foo", or "bar.codehaus.org".

While we are at it: How about moving the Maven issue tracker to issues.apache.org, where it belongs?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

My thinking on why not for the Maven issue tracker to Apache is that we're not ready. JIRA continues to have bugger all functionality for easily moving projects in and out of a JIRA instance. To get Maven in, we would need to merge the existing ones, then extract the Maven ones from the Codehaus JIRA, then either merge them in or have a new one.

Personally I'm aiming to think about merging Cayenne into the main one first - then ActiveMQ, then Struts, then Roller. Maven is something for the future when this stuff is easy.