What the board has decided about this committee or office, and the reports it filed, most recent first. Generated from the published minutes.
These categorised views are best effort. They are read from the published minutes by a program, and what it can attribute to a committee depends on how each resolution happens to be worded — so a page may be incomplete, and nothing here overrides the minutes themselves. The raw minutes are the source of truth.
Please note. The board approves the minutes of a meeting at the meeting after it, and they are published then - so the most recent meeting is not usually here. ASF Members can read the draft in the board's own repository until it is.
[raw] the published minutes, which are the record. [main index]
| Date | Action | Decided by |
|---|---|---|
| 2004-01-21 | Appointed J. Aaron Farr | the board, by resolution |
| 2003-03-19 | Appointed Berin Loritsch | the board, by resolution |
| 2002-11-18 | Appointed Nicola Ken Barozzi | the board, by resolution |
| Date | Decision | Item | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004-11-14 | Termination of the Avalon PMC | special order | approved |
| 2003-05-21 | Granting Peter Donald fulls rights / copyright to the "Naming" and "Converter" codebases within… | special order | no outcome recorded |
| 2002-11-18 | Resolution [R2] to create the Avalon PMC | special order | approved |
In response to the Board's comments and recommendations of 23 Sept 2004: "The Board hereby requests that the Avalon PMC step up and properly manage the Avalon framework. Support your existing users of that framework, including the other projects at the ASF." The Avalon PMC, in its current condition, is not capable of complying with this request. Consequently, the PMC is working with the Excalibur project to transfer the Avalon framework code and other Avalon utilities (LogKit and Cornerstone) to Excalibur which has shown a willingness and capacity to perform such support. With respect to the Merlin TLP, the proposals have been withdrawn. The Merlin developers have decided to not further seek TLP status in the ASF but rather create a fork of Merlin dubbed Metro to be hosted at DPML.net [1]. Seeing as the development of existing software under Avalon now has or will soon have new hosts, we recommend to the Board the Avalon project be closed. With that in mind, the following points should be noted: 1. The Apache James project currently uses Avalon Phoenix which has not been under active development or support for some time. There is a fork of Phoenix at Codehaus.org called Loom. A support solution for James (either hosting Phoenix itself or migrating to Loom) should be found before Avalon's closure. 2. The Metro fork has been announced but is not yet active. We would prefer that Avalon not be closed until the fork is active and Merlin users have been notified. 3. The transfer of code between Avalon and Excalibur has not yet taken place, though positive votes on the matter have occurred in both projects. 4. We have not yet determined what site resources if any should remain available following Avalon's closure. An example "closed" Avalon site is at http://www.apache.org/~farra/avalon . We are unaware of any policy or precedent we should turn to for this decision. Consequently, we ask the Board give the Avalon PMC until the next Board meeting (14 November 2004) to handle the points above before official closure of the project. At that time, the Avalon project resources (site, svn repository, mailing lists, wiki, jira, ...) can be deactivated or made read-only by the infrastructure group. We appreciate the patience and support of the Board on this matter. ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the October 20, 2004 board meeting.
There has been little activity in Avalon since the Board tabled discussion of the Metro TLP proposal last meeting. No new releases, committers, or PMC members to report. A vote suggested on the Avalon user mailing list to grant commit rights for Stephen McConnell resulted in a decision to hold off until notice about the Metro project. Stephen has been actively submitting patches since his commit rights were revoked. There has been some activity on the C# port of Avalon but it is still mostly the work of a single committer -- Hamilton Verissimo de Oliveira. There has also been some activity surrounding our Ant-based build system dubbed 'Magic' and quite a bit of healthy discussion about Avalon and Merlin/Metro improvements on the user list. In summary, the Avalon community at the moment is "holding its breath" in anticipation of the Metro TLP.
Status Report for Avalon: July 21 2004
Stephen McConnell has resigned from the PMC and resigned his committer
status within Avalon.
The Avalon PMC and developer community are currently discussing "next
steps" though things have calmed down considerably over the last two
days (since Stephen's resignation). There are a number of decisions
being considered which include:
* Some internal restructuring of Avalon to partition the traditional
framework development from newer container (merlin) development
* Separating new Merlin development out into a new project, either
directly to a TLP or to the incubator.
* Possibly "freezing" or otherwise shutting down Avalon, particularly
framework development (which is fairly stable).
And a host of other options.
The good news that I do want to report is that I am confident with
Stephen's resignation the remainder of the community is capable of
finding a path forward in the best interest of the ASF, the developers,
and our users. We will be consulting with the newly formed Excalibur
project and other Avalon dependent projects during this restructuring
process. Currently I believe we're all a little drained from recent
events and need a few days to regroup.
Status Report for Avalon: July 21 2004
Stephen McConnell has resigned from the PMC and resigned his committer
status within Avalon.
The Avalon PMC and developer community are currently discussing "next
steps" though things have calmed down considerably over the last two
days (since Stephen's resignation). There are a number of decisions
being considered which include:
* Some internal restructuring of Avalon to partition the traditional
framework development from newer container (merlin) development
* Separating new Merlin development out into a new project, either
directly to a TLP or to the incubator.
* Possibly "freezing" or otherwise shutting down Avalon, particularly
framework development (which is fairly stable).
And a host of other options.
The good news that I do want to report is that I am confident with
Stephen's resignation the remainder of the community is capable of
finding a path forward in the best interest of the ASF, the developers,
and our users. We will be consulting with the newly formed Excalibur
project and other Avalon dependent projects during this restructuring
process. Currently I believe we're all a little drained from recent
events and need a few days to regroup.
While Avalon isn't on the list of projects to report, I wanted to at least give a small status report in light of some of the recent proposals sent from this direction. Current status: 1. Excalibur TLP Proposal. This was submitted to the board last week by Leo Simons. The proposal has the full support of the Avalon PMC. The new project would take control of the Excalibur and Fortress codebases from Avalon. 2. Merlin TLP Proposal. WITHDRAWN. At the same time of the Excalibur TLP proposal, there was a Merlin TLP proposal from Avalon. This proposal has been withdrawn by the Merlin team and Avalon PMC. 3. Avalon status in general. Avalon will continue to support the core Avalon framework and the Merlin container as the "reference implementation" of Avalon. The Phoenix codebase has been moved into SVN along with the rest of Avalon but remains fairly inactive. Any other for significant changes in Avalon (ie: an Avalon "federation" project, etc.) have been dropped for the time being. It was mentioned before that Avalon needed a bit of a "kick" to get things back into order again. Well, there's been plenty of kicking and I hope that with the Excalibur TLP we'll start seeing even more positive results. I'd also like to thank the board for your advice and patience while we've dealt with these proposals and matters.
While Avalon isn't on the list of projects to report, I wanted to at least give a small status report in light of some of the recent proposals sent from this direction. Current status: 1. Excalibur TLP Proposal. This was submitted to the board last week by Leo Simons. The proposal has the full support of the Avalon PMC. The new project would take control of the Excalibur and Fortress codebases from Avalon. 2. Merlin TLP Proposal. WITHDRAWN. At the same time of the Excalibur TLP proposal, there was a Merlin TLP proposal from Avalon. This proposal has been withdrawn by the Merlin team and Avalon PMC. 3. Avalon status in general. Avalon will continue to support the core Avalon framework and the Merlin container as the "reference implementation" of Avalon. The Phoenix codebase has been moved into SVN along with the rest of Avalon but remains fairly inactive. Any other for significant changes in Avalon (ie: an Avalon "federation" project, etc.) have been dropped for the time being. It was mentioned before that Avalon needed a bit of a "kick" to get things back into order again. Well, there's been plenty of kicking and I hope that with the Excalibur TLP we'll start seeing even more positive results. I'd also like to thank the board for your advice and patience while we've dealt with these proposals and matters. ------------------------------------------------------ End of minutes for the May 26, 2004 board meeting.
Highlights of Events from mid-February
======================================
* Locked Accounts and CLA's -- Avalon has committer accounts locked
due to missing CLA's. Some of these individuals have expressed a
desire to have the account closed. The impact of removing their
contributions if no CLA can be obtained would be negligable to the
Avalon project. We, the PMC, are looking to the board on any
guidelines for action on these locked accounts -- at what point
should we freeze code? At what point (if any) should we consider
closing these accounts?
* The ASL 2.0 License has been applied to our source code. We still
need to apply the license to all our other documentation.
* PMC Membership -- Leo Simons has stepped down from the Avalon
PMC. Both he and Berin Loritsch need removed from the
committee-info.txt file. Still looking for an ACK.
* Avalon Mission Discussions -- There has been much discussion on
the Avalon mailing lists about our mission and roadmap for the
future. While this has been a hotly debated topic at times, I
believe we are moving forward and building a solid consensus. A
recent vote by the community confirms our direction as a single
project with a single architecture. See below for email thread
references.
* Releases: Fortress 1.1 and Excalibur Components Released. This
release was made at the request of the Cocoon community.
* New committer: Timothy Bennett
Plans for Next Quarter
======================
No significant changes from plans reported last month. A lot of work
will be on consolidating our Avalon containers and working out support
for our users during this process.
Avalon Mission Discussions (sampling)
==========================
[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107832888500006&r=1&w=2
[2] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107850438000003&r=1&w=2
[3] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107890943900004&r=1&w=2
[4] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=107906872800002&r=1&w=2
Highlight of Events from mid-December through mid-February
==========================================================
* Berin Loritsch stepped down as PMC Chair;
Aaron Farr was appointed in his place
* Vote and acceptance of Andreas Oberhack as committer
* Vote passed for Timothy Bennett as committer
* Merlin 3.2.5 and related components released
* MerlinDeveloper graduates from Incubator;
First beta releases of the IDE plugin have been made
* ASL 2.0 applied to Avalon framework sources
* Avalon adopts JIRA for issue tracking
* Extended proposal and vote on adding a "MutableConfiguration"
interface to the framework API -- the vote eventually passed
and while discussions never became very heated, it points out
we can still improve the efficacy of our proposal and voting
process.
* jicarilla.org requested to use the terms:
"Avalon-Framework compatible"
"Avalon-Fortress compatible"
The PMC determined that jicarilla.org's current wording
on the website falls within appropriate usage. The request
pointed out the need for a more formal TCK. I should point
out that jicarilla.org is run by Avalon developer Leo Simons.
Plans for the next quarter
==========================
* Audit of committer CLA's
Nine of our 34 committers have not signed CLA's. Most of these
have not been active in Avalon recently.
* ASL 2.0
We've applied the ASL 2.0 to only some of our subprojects.
In addition to updating the source code, we need to look
into the matter of our charter which explicitly mentions to
ASL 1.1 text.
* Project Roadmaps
By taking advantage of tools such as JIRA, the Avalon
community hopes to create and publish more thorough roadmaps
for coming months and year.
* Cooperation with External Projects
Software projects similar to Avalon (usually called "IoC
Frameworks") have been gaining attention in developer journals
and news web sites. We hope to both compete and cooperate
in this environment.
Closing Remarks
===============
As Greg Stein mentioned shortly after my appointment as Chair, I am a
bit of a new face to Apache and not well known outside of the Avalon
community. I began using Avalon in 2002 and became a committer in
2003. I originally worked on testing and bug fixes to our Avalon
Fortress container as well as our newer Merlin container, though
lately I've been more involved in documentation and assisting with our
wiki and JIRA installations.
I witnessed some of the problems with which the Avalon community
struggled and am confident we are moving forward. There has been a
bit of a "changing of the guard" amongst the committers exemplified by
my appointment as PMC Chair. Much of the current development is the
work of committers all brought in within the last year. This "new
blood" is bringing quite a bit of energy to the project and I am
looking forward to what we will bring about this year.
The report, as noted in Attachment L, was approved by General Consent.
No report received.
The Apache Avalon Project saw some mixed results this quarter, but the net result is positive. We were forced to remove committership for Peter Donald due to his ongoing issues with the other Avalon committers. In the past he has contributed a lot to the project, but in the past year his activities proved to tear the community apart. There is a much more relaxed atmosphere with the community now, and we are actually starting to be able to make some strides in cooperating with other Apache projects. We have started a plan to work with Apache Log4J to migrate the Avalon LogKit users to Log4J and provide better support for Log4J in the Avalon suite of tools. Apache Avalon has a fresh release of all of its components, and is getting ready to release another set. The long awaited Fortress container has also been released. As the team went through the release process it identified certain components that were out of scope of what the Avalon project is for, and has provided a migration path for our existing users. The Avalon team is beginning to resume talks on how to move forward with the technical future of Avalon. It seems that we have a decent idea of how we want to work together as a community, and we can move forward without forgetting our user base. The Avalon team has been trying to move in this direction for the past few months, and have recently been able to start constructively within the past couple of weeks.
* What code releases have been made? - Avalon Framework 4.1.4 - Logkit 1.2 We have a detailed roadmap of the releases to make now, mainly about Excalibur. Before getting Avalon to the next evolution phase, we want to make a release of everything we have now to support our users, so that they will have a set of Avalon deliverables guaranteed to interoperate. Apache James is working with us to ensure that the releases are done in a compatible and comprehensice way, and Stephen McConnell has been given temporary access to make modifications to James, in order to bring it in synch. Gump runs have resumed, and the projects dependent on Avalon are benefiting with succesfull Gump runs themselves, especially James and Cocoon. We are doing all the releases following the mirroring guidelines. * Any legal issues to bring to the board? None. All issues that have arised with spinoffs from the Avalon project have been resolved. *Any cross-project issues that need to be addressed? We are continuing to spinoff non-core parts of Avalon, by making the actual authors of the code make the decision. We are keeping an active eye on them to ensure that licensing is correctly taken care of. AltRMI has finally been relocated to Incubator, but has not asked for a target location. Not an issue, just a note. *Any problems with committers, members, etc? The PMC is finally starting to act cohesively, and we have managed to go through the last "crisis" mostly ourselves for the first time. ATM we don't have problems with committers or members that we cannot take care of ourselves IMO. We are working to ensure that all committers to Avalon have signed CLA on record ASAP, and have already sent notice mails. * Plans and expectations for the next period? We have a roadmap we agree on and concrete work on getting a comprehensive release of all our active code is in progress. Work on the code has resumed, and developers are working together on the same set of goals. The project is being reorganized in a more comprehensive manner and the new site starts to reflect it http://avalon.apache.org/ * etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!) I request to be lifted from my position as an Avalon chair, and that Berin Loritsch is appointment to it, as requested by the Avalon comminity per below attached vote. These months have been very difficult for Avalon, and I hope that my contribution has helped Avalon in the process of reorganization, both as a project and as a community. As many have pointed out, I'm not a "true" Avaloner, and this is one of the main reasons why I accepted to become chair. In this way the Avalon community has passed the transition period with all core developers as peers, during a "reincubation" phase. A very important thing that has happened is the explicit delegation of the 'Peter Donald' issue to the Avalon PMC, and the clear offer to give the Avalon PMC full disclosure to documents pertaining it. This has brought to the important decision to reinstantiate Peter Donald's rights, and has made all PMCers actively responsible about the issue. From the generally accepted roadmap to unification, from what I see on the mailing lists, and the way we are now handling flames, it seems to me that the initial period is over, and my job is done. As I have pointed out to the Avalon developers when I received the mandate, I would not have remained a day more than necessary, and I want to keep faith to that commitment. I hope that my efforts have been of use, thank you all.
Out project STATUS file
-------------------------
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-avalon/STATUS.txt?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
Diff between this and last report:
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-avalon/STATUS.txt.diff?r1=text&tr1=1.13&r2=text&tr2=1.21&diff_format=h
Additional info for the board
-------------------------
* What code releases have been made?
Phoenix has been released to fix some bugs.
We will soon release Fortress.
We now have a tentative roadmap to a single container, and Fortress
will be the first step.
* Any legal issues to bring to the board?
AvalonDB, part of Avalon Apps, will want to move out of Apache
and have the license be reassigned to the authors-contributors
of that codebase. Pending the request of the authors for this,
I'm asking if the board would have the intent to grant such
a copyright change to the original authors, specifying if
the adoption of an Apache-like license would influence this
decision.
* Any cross-project issues that need to be addressed?
We are progressively getting rid of projects that are not in scope.
AltRMI has asked Incubator to be relocated, but has not asked
for a target location.
We will decide base-by basis about where to move them.
* Any problems with committers, members, etc?
There is growing unrest for some, due to uncertaincy about
Peter Donald's status. In my past report I saw that the one
that were originally were resisting change were partecipating
in it actively. To be more precise this time, if we talk about
changes in the technical project direction, it still applies.
The problem is about new community rules we are deciding on.
The focus on good code instead of good community is still
very rooted in some committers.
* Plans and expectations for the next period?
For the first time in weeks, decisions started to appear without
strong discussions, like the one about the project roadmap.
This is a good sign, so I expect that we will follow that roadmap
and work actively towards a container effort done with all the
community.
We will be probably creating a Component subproject where projects
that use Avalon can contribute in maintaining the Avalon components
they use. This would be the first step towards a future unified
Component repository.
* etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!)
The 3 month suspension of Peter Donald is coming to an end,
and we don't see a resolution to the issue. This is
starting to hurt.
He hasn't appeared to change the same disruptive patterns seen
before, and has again said that he was not informed about the
reason of the suspension.
I see two trends now, a positive one about the advancement of the
community, and a negative one incentrated on the suspension of
Peter Donald. Things are now moving (still slowly) in
a single direction, except for the suspension afromentioned.
A recent discussion on @author tags has ignited a very strong
discussion [1].Recognition in the form of @author tags is so deeply
rooted that it has been percieved by some as if all code and
documents of the project were to be cleaned of any reference
to committers.
It's quite clear to me that it disturbes some that "perfectly
good code" is being abandoned "just because it's a one-man
codebase". My feeling is that it will change when we will
see tangible results from the new effort.
As for me, I'll try to keep a somewhat lower profile now
that all major issues have been addressed, and concentrate
on the application of these decisions, in any way I
will feel that the community would prefer.
[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=104297259700001&r=1&w=2
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Our project STATUS file
-------------------------
http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/jakarta-avalon/STATUS.txt?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup
Additional info for the board
-------------------------
* What code releases have been made?
None yet.
It's possible that we shortly will release Fortress to support
our ECM users till the discussion and coding of the new Avalon is
completed. Phoenix will still be actively maintained and developed
within the scopes of the Avalon Project in the same way.
* Any legal issues to bring to the board?
Microsoft has called an API "Avalon", as our project.
As with other Apache projects, the "fix" would be to reference
Avalon always as "Apache Avalon".
Also, we still have some files that contain the short Apache
license. It has been said that we should use the full license
till version 2.0 comes up, but there has been some resistance
by some committers in the past. I want to address this now
and have all files use the long version.
*Any cross-project issues that need to be addressed?
Avalon is a framework based on components, and thus we have many
other projects that have Avalon components.
We polled the Jakarta Turbine project to know if they were
interested in a common space where to have a Avalon component
repository, and the response was positive. Also in Avalon
it was positive, and other projects like Jakarta James and
OJB (a developer contacted me directly) seem interested.
What we need to define is where to have this repository.
Originally we were thinking of having it in Apache Commons,
but we are trying to decide if it's better to have it under
the Avalon project, with its own set of committers.
There is also a project called EOB (enterprise object broker) based
on Avalon and coded by Avalon committers on sourceforge that could
move to Apache.
We are thinking if it would make sense to have it under the Avalon
project or not. Similarly for Jesktop and Monarch, GUI frameworks
based on Avalon.
There can be concerns that this could split the community again,
but in fact these are efforts build using Avalon and not to be
Avalon implementations.
*Any problems with committers, members, etc?
None, fortunately. The recent things that have happened have
created unrest in the beginning, but now also the ones that
originally were resisting change are not part of it, in an
active way. This is about all committers/members except
Peter Donald, who is in a particular situation having the
privileges suspended.
* Plans and expectations for the next period?
We are seriously discussing and making concrete progress on
the definition of a new codebase.
We have decided that we should maintain legacy codebases,
so in the next months we will continue maintenance and
discussions. Once the new system is done, we will deprecate
all other systems and focus solely on that.
We still need to decide what to do with our components, as the above
discussion deals with the container.
* etc (your own thoughts on what is important would be helpful!)
The suspension of Peter Donald's rights has evidently disrupted
the community. This is not a negative comment, just a constatation.
The combined efforts of Sam Ruby, Stefano Mazzocchi, Greg Stein and
I, especially in the initial period, have helped in making other
committers more confident in the future of Avalon and in stabilizing
the situation. The main fear was that the Phoenix codebase would
have been declared dead without proper deprecation and all Avalon
based on an Alpha system. I had to reassure more than once to
explain it was not the case. I don't know where this fear came from.
IMHO this disruption has made committers aware of what was actually
happening and about the negative mechanisms that had become the norm
in the community.
Now the situation is much better and the community is restarting
with renewed force, slowly but steadily understanding the value
of peer review on all the codebase and respect.
Of great help has been the intervention of two Jakarta James
committers. James uses Avalon, and they are interested in making
the outcome be positive. Other knowledgeable Avalon developers have
also chimed in, and this has finally made us get a feel of the
situation. Seeing this, we are now deciding to make non-Avalon
committers that are part of active Avalon-using projects be
voted in the Avalon PMC by existing members.
Peter Donald has mixed positive attitude with the same disruptive
patterns seen before. Things seem to be moving, but slowly and
not always in the same direction.
Overall, here are some of the measures taken that had a
positive effect. They are to be remembered for how to deal with
similar cases in the future.
o The unification of the development mailing list has stopped
immediately the divide in development effort responsibility.
o The creation of the avalon-sandbox CVS module has stopped the
problem of making sandbox code appear and act as de-facto
released.
The future use of the sandbox will have to be voted for internal
forks too, so that they are done only in a spirit of cooperation.
o The creation and maintenance of the STATUS file in CVS has made
developers aware of the common goals and situation, and finally
gives a reference for the issues being discussed.
It helps in bringing us together.