[news.eclipse.board.committer.reps] Re: Projects vs. Components and Incu

[Ed Merks <merks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott,

That's what I expected.  I've kept EMFT around as a satellite project 
for EMF just to be able to take advantage of the new rules, but upon 
closer inspection it seems I also have to get all the existing 
components in there to rename the downloads they've been providing for 
years to include the word incubation.  It seems to me that having a 
version number < 1.0 already implies incubation and hence there is 
already sufficient information for users to look at the version number. 
I have no problem with marking (parts of) the website, download pages, 
and any of the other useful places, and perhaps even the feature/plugin 
descriptions or names (but not IDs), but I'm not happy with needing to 
put a "stamp on ugliness" right on the name of the zip file itself.  I 
think the requirement to add the word incubation should perhaps only 
apply to downloads that contain unreviewed code and hence are suspect 
from an IP point of view and in fact might even need to be withdrawn if 
there are IP challenges discovered later.  Surely the most important 
issue is that the client knows she is downloading "suspect code", but by 
having to stamp both reviewed and unreviewed code the same way, the 
client is actually worse off, I think. Perhaps others might disagree 
that this is too lax, but I think requiring the word incubation on 
downloads that are not incubating, clearly a meaningless and confusing 
contradiction, for no other reason than to be able to take advantage of 
parallel IP rules for new incubating components, doesn't make a lot of 
sense.  It will just result in a multitude of EMFT like projects, but 
perhaps that's the intent.

I'll be interested to hear more opinions and to understand better the 
current intent along with the thought processes that went into the 
current rules.  Hopefully we can come up with some improvements that 
perhaps satisfy the actual intent better than does the current set of 
rules.  One problem Bjorn often points out is that components are not a 
very well-defined concept in the foundation's rule books and that 
there's no such thing as a subsubproject.


Scott Lewis wrote:
> Ed Merks wrote:
> > Scott,
> >
> > Before I comment about something that was decided without my input 
> > and hence for which I don't know all the background, let me ask you a 
> > question first.  Would your objection be alleviated if the 
> > requirements were relaxed a bit to say that only any download 
> > containing components that have not completed IP review be marked 
> > with incubation so that you could have your normal download as before 
> > and one or more separate downloads for the incubating components?  
>
>
> Yes.
>
> It seems to me the intent of
> > the rule would be that you know from the download that the contained 
> > code is not fully EPL certified, but for any download that is fully 
> > certified, it seem unnecessary to mark it as incubating when in fact 
> > it's not...
>
>
> Yes, that's exactly right.  I think the problem is that currently the 
> conformance is too coarse...it's applied at the entire project level 
> rather than at the component level.
>
> Scott