So, in the spirit of open source software meritocracies: please place
your money where your mouth is. Come up with a list of actionable
changes you'd make if you were king. Lets hear it--and if everyone
agrees to a particular change, we'll declare it made. (Note:
declaring
anything to a volunteer-driven organization doesn't guarantee that
anyone will actually do it.)
In no way do I want to be king, and in an effort to calm things down
a bit, let me say that I'm really, really happy with aolserver, and
the last major release had amazing things in it. My only real nit is
that so many cool things are not-so-well-documented, but hell, it's
open source. I just spot things in the text files, and then figure it
out by reading the C code, which is often commented, but always clean
and readable.
On the subject of cool things and not-so-well-documented, I'd like to
bring up Naviserver (you can find it on sourceforge, it's an
independent fork of aolsever, at http://naviserver.sourceforge.net).
Their fork of aolserver has an insane number of changes to it, and
lots of great ideas (look at http://naviserver.cvs.sf.net/naviserver/
naviserver/ChangeLog?view=markup). There's a handful of developers
working on it, and it seems like a real hotbed of innovation.
I've not used naviserver, though I evaluated it seriously, because it
has so many differences to aolserver, almost all undocumented, that
it was really hard for me to get up to speed to, and I found it less
reliable than aolserver, probably because of all those innovations.
I kind of like the slower pace of aolserver, I can actually run a
production web site on it. This is not meant as an insult to Vlad and
the other Naviserver developers, I'm just pointing out how the two
development communities differ.
However, I was wondering if we should perhaps look at merging back
some of the best things in naviserver, back into aolserver. In fact,
maybe we should treat the aolserver/naviserver split like ubuntu
treats its two releases, and recognize that naviserver as an
innovative, highly chaotic playground, and merging back in the best
ideas from it back into aolserver after a long delay (6 months to a
year) once each feature has settled down a bit and we can evaluate
whether, in hindsight, it really was a good idea and the way it was
implemented turned out well.
I'd be game to go through the naviserver changelog in the future, and
be part of a discussion of what is in there that we might want to
merge back into aolserver.
-john
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