> From: James Duncan Davidson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Tuesday, 19 December 2000 15:52 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Whoa Bessie... Was -- Re: [Proposal] AntFarm > > But the community has had to deal with that instead of the pain being > brunted by a few people who occupy the role of "architect". >
I must admit I found that a little surprising. There was not that much feedback on ant-dev about this "pain". Certianly not from the other Jakarta or Apache projects that I recognized. Craig was pretty much the only one I recall who made a reference to the way properties handling had changed. Anyway, let me quote Jon from a recent Tomcat thread > It is called innovation. Constantly improving the code to be better. Trying > new things to see which one works best. I see absolutely nothing wrong with > that. > > No idea is perfect the first time and re-doing things until you get it right > is perfectly acceptable. If people do have problems with changes in Ant, I would hope they communicate them here on ant-dev. Sam's nightly build was his attempt to find those inter-project problems up front. If people checked it out, they could see problems coming. > > How would you say the current Ant is radically different from > what you want it > > to be? > > Its more complicated in syntax.. Its less flexible in picking up > tasks.. And > it doesn't lend itself to integration well. And it's a pain in the arse to > deal with all those scripts which were intended to go away. > Fair enough. I would like to know, then, how you envisage simplifying and changing the syntax. You will presumably be dropping some features that have crept in. Which ones do you think? > > Is that the model you really want?. I don't know JDOM at all, > but I wonder > > what sort of community will build up around it. To me > OpenSource is not just > > about having access to the source. It is about the community > that builds up > > around that source. In Apache projects, you can achieve > recognition for your > > contributions by being voted a committer. It is an incentive to > contribute. > > JDOM has a pretty active community around it. There are people besides Jas > and Brett that are committers. I went here http://cvs.jdom.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jdom/COMMITTERS.txt and here http://www.jdom.org/credits/index.html and found no mention of anyone else. Not a big deal, of course. That may be how JDOM works - I don't know. But you did mention currency of a kind. > > Isn't that what the concept of a committer is all about. It is > the recognition > > of your contributions by peers. How do you want to go further? > Some sort of > > perpetual ownership for the original contribution? > > Well, at least not being marginalized out... If you create something you > obviously have a vested interested -- and a vision that may not be easily > communicated via any other means. > I certainly would not want to see you marginalized out. That would be bad. I guess it is just not how I understood the process as articulated on the Jakarta web site. http://jakarta.apache.org/site/roles.html > > So who gets to define what is Ant? Is that you? > > Bluntly, yes. Well then let us formalize that role and make it known to people up front. We could have Users->Developers->Committers->Owners->PMC Would we do away with voting, +1s, -1s too? > With the help of a lot of people. But where there's > disagreement... Who defined Cocoon. Stefano. Who defines Apache 2.0? Ryan. > Who defines Perl? Larry Wall. There's a pattern there. Collaborative > development still needs a lead. > Sometimes the lead changes though. You went away and ant changed. No you are back and it seems it will change again. > > > Wierd indeed. I wonder if O'Reilly would want a book about > AntEater? :-) I'm > > curious, will your book describe tasks and concepts contributed > to ant by > > other people. That will put you in an interesting position :-) > > Why would it do so? I didn't say that I wanted to write every line of code > in Ant. I think you have taken what I said in a way that I didn't > intend it. OK, Sorry if that is the case. You talked about "I want to protect these benefits of coming up with Ant that I've got." I thought that implied that you would be dealing mainly with the ant core / core tasks. > Quite frankly if the core of Ant is good, I'd rather not write > *any* of the > tasks if I could get away with it. I'd just want them to follow some > conventions. :) > > And would O'Reilly want a book about AntEater that wasn't Ant. > Who knows. It > would be a hell of a sell job. indeed :-) > BTW. There is a chapter in the outline for external tasks. I don't see how > that would put me in an interesting position. From an authorship > perspective, I think that it's important that Ant act they way it > should -- > and it doesn't matter how it's coded as long as it works. > So, is AntEater a foregone conclusion? You have a vision and it seems to have primacy because you came up with the original concept of Ant. I don't know why we are futzing around then. Lets just have AntEater and make the best of it. If I don't like it, I can always get forked :-) See ya.
