[Dbix-class] PROPOSAL: Relinquish firstcome rights to Peter Rabbitson

[Darren Duncan]

Now that this was brought up by a third party, I am weakly inclined to support 
Matthew's proposal (but this is NOT an official second), and here are my current 
thoughts on why:

1. First note that I don't currently use DBIC myself nor do I currently work for 
any company that does, though I did in the past and I might in the future.

2. A year back I weakly supported Matt's proposed governance model gaining 
FIRSTCOME; that is, I voted in favor but didn't have a strong opinion either way.

3. Despite the sizeable userbase of DBIC and vested interests in it, at the end 
of the day no one under Matt's governance model has actually put in the level of 
effort to make more releases or cross the finish line, so as far as the public 
is concerned this project has been stalled for a good 18 months now.  I grant 
that there are a number of active branches in the git repositories, but nothing 
delivered.

4. From what I've observed over the last year, Peter Rabbitson still has a 
strong vested interest in continuing to make releases of and improvements to 
DBIC, even to the point of discussing and arranging for an elaborate kludge on 
the way CPAN modules are normally installed in order to provide upgrade paths 
for his users, including his own workplaces, without their having to make 
changes to their own code to account for module renames etc.  These kludges were 
very begrudgingly accepted by the perl5-porters from what I could see, but no 
one is truly happy with it.

5. I believe that if Peter is given back FIRSTCOME and primary control of the 
DBIx::Class namespace, he will continue to make new quality releases, helping 
the user base, and also his installer kludge of sharing the namespace would go away.

6. To be honest with the current status quo I already recommend against using 
DBIC at all for new projects, and I certainly wouldn't want to use it myself 
under present circumstances.  Partly its my own sensibilities, I don't really 
like ORMs in principle and think a better database design is to use SQL stored 
procedures (which can be versioned) as THE database API, such that what database 
tables actually exist is considered internals that no applications should have 
tight coupling to, which is what DBIC and other such ORMs do by their nature; 
just a thin DBI wrapper to take away boilerplate for calling the stored 
procedures in Perl is useful.  But even if I didn't feel that way, DBIC 
currently feels like a dead project that I don't feel would get any decent support.

Bottom line, I support Matthew's proposal, but not strongly enough to be the 
proposal seconder, because I make effort to avoid having a horse in the race.

-- Darren Duncan

On 2018-01-16 5:31 PM, Matthew Phillips wrote:
> After some internal communication with DBIC team members (which spurred the 
> bootstrap removal that passed today), I am sending in this proposal to enact 
> Andrew Beverley's 2016 proposal[1] to reestablish Peter Rabbitson's FIRSTCOME 
> rights and overall control of the DBIC project.
> 
> I believe if there is any chance for this project to continue moving in any 
> direction, this step must be taken to allow ribasushi to continue his excellent 
> work on DBIC, which stopped approximately a year ago. To be clear: there has 
> been not a single code-related commit to the dbix-class repository since 
> ribasushi left [2][3]. There is even a sizeable amount of work[4] that Peter 
> left in master, that has not been touched and has no chance of release.
> 
> I have spoken to ribasushi, and confirmed that his circumstances currently allow 
> him to take the project further, on the condition of reestablishing his BDFL 
> status. Given the events of late 2016, I find his preconditions beyond reasonable.
> 
> Pragmatically, If there is any hope of this project not being marked officially 
> dead, it will need to be driven by someone with both time and technical ability. 
> The last year+ is ample evidence that ribasushi still remains the only person 
> interested (let alone capable) to do so. There is noone else.
> 
> On the chance that someone does decide to vote against this proposal, I request 
> you that clarify _why_ you are choosing dormant project death over activity 
> driven by Peter.
> 
> Thanks
> Matt