we have already had issues where a PR has been made by one, review by another, merged all without knowledge of the spec leads and in a few hours (which were the middle of the night for both spec leads).
I understand there's a little getting used to the new process when you have worked under the JCP for such a long time. I have worked not nearly as long in the JCP, and I too had to get used to the changes.
For better or worse, the Eclipse process does not define a spec lead. So the above quote is basically not correct. A PR can always be merged without the knowledge of a spec lead, since there simply is no spec lead.
The fact that a PR is made by someone, and then reviewed by another (a committer) is perfectly normal. You can't review your own PRs.
The PRs I think you were referring to were likely about the ton of commits that were done for Jakarta EE 8; changing e.g. mentions of "EJB" to "Jakarta Enterprise Beans", updating the EE4J parent pom from 1.0.4 to 1.0.5 etc. As those were previously agreed changes (set by the platform and committees), there's, IMHO, no need to have a lengthy review period for those changes. If I'm not mistaken Bill said something along those lines as well; having lengthy review periods for changes that are part of already agreed work is counterproductive.
Of course nobody in their right mind would completely change how say HttpServletRequest works, do a PR for that, and have it merged within a few hours. That would indeed be madness. I don't think such a thing has happened in any EE4J project.
I just do not believe that 15 equal committers can collaborate productively without some structure. I don't want the old single leader commits everything model, but the 15 equal committers is too far the other way. We are striving for a happy medium.
Am I correct that it seems your fear is that two of those unknown committers suddenly become active and make major changes to the Servlet API without consulting anyone else?
Perhaps a thing to consider is whether those committers are really unknown, or are they just unknown to you (and perhaps, me). Maybe we can identity these unknown committers and ask them to tell something about themselves? Would that mitigate some of your concerns?
Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms
