+1 for Phoenix becoming a jakarta top level project ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Donald" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 5:18 PM Subject: [Proposal] Breaking up Avalon
Hi, I had hoped that it would not get to this point but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. However it looks like the best thing for all parties involved is to break up Avalon into different projects. One of the first things I am going to propose is the graduation of Phoenix and related infrastructure to a new top level project. Below is the outline of my reasoning why I believe this to be in the best interests of Avalon. Over the next few weeks I plan to put together a "vision" document and proposal - if anyone else wants to help (or do it) then they are welcome to take over ;) It may be best to start from the start. I initially started observing avalon when it was pretty dead. Nothing was happening so I went away. Then all of a sudden this Berin guy started doing stuff and then there was life. Fede and Stefano also came back and together they kicked the tires and started the fires. I was building another component based server framework at the time and thus I used this as an opportunity to bounce ideas off Berin. At the time what I was writing was much more monolithic, lower abstractions and used a lot more off the shelf components (w3c DOM/JDOM, JNDI, Properties etc). I eventually managed to refactor into something nicer - more in the way Avalon was going. A month or so later I came on board and stuff progressed. We started to break apart the monolithic avalon project into bite sized chunks that more accurately modelled the units in which they were used. We also became able to actually release parts that were at different maturity levels. It was still "big ball of mud" style programming but we were moving forward. We regularly rewrote the whole codebase - as many as three times in one particular month. Along with that was the flamefests - far more excited than has been seen in Avalon for a long time. However they were of a far nicer variety than what is now present in Avalon - at least then we were all interested in promoting Avalon as a whole and there was mutual respect between developers. Even when we were competing for our ideas we went out of our way to help other - I even recall Berin helping out with JDOM stuff which he wasn't too fond of ;) Some of the code was not too hot but the level of collaboration and cooperation was great. Fast forward to now. Most of the problems arise from committers who were added into Avalon before they had demonstrated any capability or desire to cooperate with the existing committers (and some to this day have not committed a line of code). As a result there is whole codebases that are one man jobs - a nomans land which other committers avoid like the plague. It also seems that we have aquired that condition of "try to block competition via politics" which previously we had avoided. On a few occasions Stephen has tried to block improvements in Phoenix because it competed with his pet container. And thats not to mention the personal attacks that have recently become a distinguishing quality on the avalon lists. Add that to the behaviour regarding code ownership and it just gets messy. So things are changing - right? Appologies have been made and Avalon may become a TLP - which will supposedly "fix" the problems that have occured in the past. Well - I guess I am a big believer in actions speaking louder than words. And actions have not changed that much. Rather than seeking consensus for major decisions (like becoming a TLP) we have seen Stephen try to push through his own ideas - even when it was obvious that a large proportion of active developers chose not to engage the proposal, it was still sent along to the board. Stephen still trolls the phoenix list - though I am sure he would describe it as enlightening users to what their missing by not choosing his "amazing Merlin" rather than phoenix. It has got bad enough that a few people choose to ask me support questions by personal email rather than via the public lists because they feel uncomfortable with the way Stephen "helps". Hell - some people have even explicitly asked me not to mention their projects in public yet because they don't want Stephens "help". So regardless of whether it is intentional or not Stephen is a harmful influence on people wanting to use or develope phoenix. Also discussion about the way the "new" avalon will operate disturbs me. It has been implied that the PMC will be making development decisions to solve some of the problems. And then theres Nicolas claims that "Phoenix community != Avalon community, it's quite clear to all" and that combined with his vision and discussion that involved removing my commit privs if I did not agree with the vision was somewhat disturbing. What was even more disturbing was the "cooperate or else" thread sent by Stephen to the community list where he outlined his thoughts on how cooperation should be done. Relevent snippet; "What this discussion should be about is a framework we are obliged to live with because this is this "brand" management thing - not a discussion on a particular flame. At the end of the day - getting a bunch of committers to get their heads together on brand is a painful experience - UNLESS - you provide incentives to maintain a brand. How do you do that? You create a downside that is sufficiently unattractive that people have to work together to sort things out. The downside of forcing re-branding is a significant downside. Its just like forking - but heavier - forking just means that you have to work your but off to build the community, but re-branding means investing a lot more time in brand recognition and brand loyalty - and loosing a lot more relative to what exists in terms of public perception. People actually do think about the downsides of possible actions before taking particular actions. These downsides are weighed against the overhead of solving a problem though collaboration and other positive good sounding stuff that we like to talk about. So before you tell me off - keep in mind that up-sides and downsides provide real people with a sense of perspective. Without perspective, well, you just don't get the depth." So I can just imagine what is going to happen when we start integrating Info into Phoenix or some other feature that competes with his toolkits. Putting all these things together it becomes obvious that Phoenix is hurt by staying in Avalon. The users are hurt because they are subject to trolling and the developers are hurt because they constantly have to work around other people who don't participate in the development but can still cause harm. So the solution? The solution would be moving phoenix development out of avalon into a product-centric project focused on Phoenix and supporting infrastructure. This should also help the wider Avalon community because it will remove the reason for much conflict and it will help bring the scope down to a more manageable level. Anyways feel free to email me on or off list with suggestions or offers to help. Anyone who is interested in being part of this initiative should also email me and I will make sure their name is down on the proposal. All phoenix devs will obviously be included but you should email me to give your thoughts anyways :) -- Cheers, Peter Donald ----------------------------------------------- "You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." -Mark Twain ----------------------------------------------- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
