Hi Dims,

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 11:09 PM, Davanum Srinivas <dava...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for this.

It took me a few seconds to understand your concern, I had never thought about it like that before.

I don't think putting incubator artifacts in the main Maven repository removes all distinction between incubator and non-incubator code. If we require incubator artifacts to have "-incubating" in their version names, that's perfectly clear.

Such a dependency might be made somewhat invisible by transitive dependencies on incubating projects, but the problem is exactly the same if a non-incubating project depends on GPL stuff transitively. That's a Maven problem, not an incubator problem.

Currently, one has to explicitely check their complete dependency tree to sure about what their code uses, when working with Maven. Or use private repositories exclusively, with controlled addition of artifacts. That's not in any way an incubator problem.

To answer your question, to me the value of the incubator is as much in creating communities as in creating clean code. Having been a mentor of Wicket, I think this is a perfect example of a community that already worked quite well, but needed some mentoring to ease into the Apache way, and I think the results were very successful.

Other projects don't incubate as well, especially now that the incubator has grown larger with relatively few people (IMHO) taking care of the health of the incubator at large.

To me this means that a few things need to be fixed in the incubator - like reducing bureaucracy to a minimum while avoiding losing track of incubating projects, making docs more consistent and minimalistic, and making sure companies do not hijack their way into the ASF via the incubator.

That doesn't mean we don't need an incubator, quite the contrary in my opinion: we need a stronger and more fun incubator.

-Bertrand