[eclipse.org-planning-council] Re: [cross-project-issues-dev] Galileo Mu

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas@xxxxxxx>]

Richard Gronback wrote:

And to be clear, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything.  Participation on the Release Train is voluntary, but comes at the cost of agreeing to release at a higher bar than what is normally required for releasing as a non-train project.  There’s not a whip involved here, but a carrot.  If you’d like to be on the train, there is a cost, that’s all.

Force or carrot. It's all relative and I guess we have very different view points. If we want to retain a vibrant and growing community, we better bet on the train. In other words, if we want to stay alive, we better be on the train. So the whip is perhaps not half bad as an analogy after all. I'm uncertain where to find the carrot though.

Analogies aside, I think this is more about perception then anything. Much of the work that is done is done on a voluntary basis. I care for a group of people that likes what we provide to them. The community is growing and the amount of external contributions are growing. That's is all good. If you would ask our user base what they find most important right now, things like message bundles, bidi-support, icu4j, and many other requirements that we recently had our bugzilla flooded with, would come very far down on the list (if they would ever end up there). Participation in the release train however, is always very desirable.

The time and resources we have are always limited. We want to spend those resources giving our community what they need the most. Why are we forced into a corner where we must choose between participation in the release train and the best interests of our community? That in itself seems like a contradiction in terms.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren