Status

RESOLVED 

OutcomeRejected. Incubation status will remain in the project lifecycle.
Minutes Link2019 12 19 TSC Minutes

Overview of Proposal

See Hart's email on Incubation/Active status which essentially proposes to have projects start directly into Active status when approved and investigate other possible means to communicate how much of community support a project has.

Formal Proposal(s)

Forgo the Project Lifecycle Incubation state and let projects start directly into Active state.

Action Items

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Reviewed By


10 Comments

  1. Tracy Kuhrt

    Is the suggestion to change the lifecycle to Proposal → Active → First Major Release → Deprecated → End of Life?

    1. Arnaud J Le Hors

      Yes.

  2. Hart Montgomery

    We probably aren't ready for this, as my email says.  Figuring out the community metrics situation makes more sense to do first.

    That being said, more discussion on this whole process is probably useful, as long as we can do it in a constructive way.  

  3. Gari Singh

    We cannot do this ... unless we want to only allow projects that meet whatever criteria we set for the artist currently known as "active status".

  4. Danno Ferrin

    I feel one of the problems is the bar to become an incubated/lab project and the bar to be an active project is too far apart.  There is very little signal granted to external observers short of digging through the mailing lists as to whether a project is healthy and growing or passively or actively being abandoned.  Similarly the only real step past active/first major release is deprecated, there is no way for those not enfranchised in the project to quickly asses the project's health short of reading a bunch of reports and mailing list/chat traffic.

    Here's a model I created to address these issues and align what the "status" of a project is with what users outside of contributors and maintainers view it as - a gauge for the health and maturity of the project.  

    Lifecycle as State Machine

    1. Arnaud J Le Hors

      There is essentially no bar to starting a lab, by design.

      I agree it would be good to provide people with more info on how a project is doing beyond being in "Active" status but maybe this should be done in a different way, along the lines of what Hart was suggesting with the publication of pertinent information and metrics.

    2. Hart Montgomery

      Thank you for the very well thought out proposal.  This is full of good ideas.  In my opinion, it's always a good thing to provide more information to people.

      If you're interested in this further, I'd recommend looking at the Apache lifecycle process.  Unfortunately, their documentation takes after ours in that it is difficult to find exactly what you are looking for, but here are some things to start with:

      http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html

      https://incubator.apache.org/policy/incubation.html

      https://www.apache.org/dev/project-requirements


      Apache has a similar-looking infrastructure–labs, incubated projects, and active projects–which is definitely not an accident, particularly since Brian has been involved.  But there are some pretty large divergences, particularly in what we allow projects in incubation to do (Apache is very restrictive about marketing for projects in incubation, for instance).  I am sure Brian can say more about this, and I am surprised he hasn't weighed in more on this topic.


      I hope this is helpful and interesting.  Thanks for your effort on this.

  5. Arnaud J Le Hors

    I think the term "Active" is a source of confusion because in practice we can have a project in Incubation that is more active than a project in "Active" status...

    Maybe we should rename it "Graduated' or something along those lines. ASF calls that "Top Level Project" which could work for us. This would clearly communicate that the project reached a millestone (at one point in time) without necessarily implying anything about the current state of activity in the project and how it is currently doing against the Incubation Exit Criteria.

    1. Hart Montgomery

      There are far larger differences between what "podlings" and TLPs at Apache can do than Active/Incubation at Hyperledger.  We don't really have any distinctions about what projects in active status can do versus those in incubation.  Ostensibly there is some marketing distinction, but historically we (Hyperledger) have marketed both active projects and projects in incubation.  

  6. Christopher Ferris

    It doesn't change things much to rebrand "Active", IMO