On Sun, 17 Nov 2002 22:34, Leo Simons wrote:
> I personally think that making phoenix a new top level project would be
> bad for apache as a whole because of the grossly overlapping concerns
> between any such phoenix project and a possible avalon project; we would
> have rather permanent fragmentation of community.
Phoenix has been in line for graduating out of Avalon for a very long time. It
has had the momentum, community and support for a very long time. I have
worked to discourage that behaviour through a number of different strategies.
The phoenix-dev and apps lists were specifically created to give extra space
and to avoid a split. Everytime the issue gets raised I would always suggest
we put it off to when Phoenix was a released product or to some nebulous
future point in time.
The main reason was this was because Avalon has a severe brand management
problem. Before "Avalon" existed - when "Avalon" was just a code name for a
version of the the "Java Apache Server Framework" - it had problems then. I
expected that Phoenix would eventually start to gather some good karma/brand
and it would rub off on Avalon proper. This would lead to a better
development environment and a more active Avalon community.
Think of it as similar to Cocoon. Many of the successes of Avalon have been
tied to Cocoon successes. Many developers first learn about Avalon from
Cocoon. And many Avalon decisions were made for the benefit of Cocoon.
I saw that synergy as being great and I believed that if the same could be
true with Phoenix then Avalon would be sooo much better off. This was
starting to happen. We had our first release and if we continue down this
path we will soon have a very nice platform - which will hopefully channel
some more interest back into Avalon. I had hoped to keep this internal to
Avalon because it would create closer ties. If that can't be then so be it.
However the response so far has been encouraging. Mostly it has been of the
form "about time!", "do it anyway", "easier sell to boss" etc.
As to overlapping charters. It is true that there is a degree of overlap - the
new project would differ in that it is product-centric. It would all be about
the development of a single container and thus many things that would be in
scope for Avalon will be out of scope for Phoenix and vice versa. It is
expected that Phoenix will still use A-F and parts of Avalon Excalibur and
that there will be a high degree of cross talk.
The end result will be two communities but they need not be conflicting but
can cooperate. Some believe that there are already two communities in Avalon
- in which case the split is more than overdue anyways.
> I think that this would be bad from the perspective of users of apache
> software because it becomes difficult to choose between what would
> become competing projects (right now, we as avalon community can say "go
> use Avalon Phoenix or Avalon ECM, this-and-that version" and the
> competition is internal).
Not wanting competition is NOT a good reason to try and block said
competition. After all that has happened in Avalon I would have hoped that
this would be obvious. Competition should be encouraged, embraced and brought
into the fold. If merges can not happen for technical reasons then obviously
different markets were being served by competing codebase and thus they may
not really compete but compliment.
--
Cheers,
Peter Donald
----------------------------------------
"Liberty means responsibility. That is
why most men dread it." - Locke
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