>> My real point is that I think that it's really hard for >> multiple people to write an architecture together. I trust that >> anyone proposing a major change to an architecture is experienced >> enough or smart enough to know how to get to the end point. > > Hmmm, have you ever read some of thouse random thoughs flying around? > Several times I had ideas but they were foggy and the community helped > clearing up the fog. I think this is part of the brainstorming that > helps collaborative design.
Yes, and I'm still advocating the brainstorming. What I'm suggesting is that only one person can really "design" something. > Sure, I agree with you that there must be some 'leadership', in sense of > 'leading the effort' (not ruling it), but I think it *IS* possible to > design architectures in the open and I think the value of Cocoon proves > this pretty evidently. If I was to ask a random Cocoon developer to tell me the architecture of Cocoon I'm not sure I could get a coherent picture. There's a lot of pieces to Cocoon, many of them overlap and some run counter to each other. As such, it's not clear that Cocoon currently has a complete architecture (some of that seems due to V1 compatibility issues). Certainly the work that you are doing now seems to be helping to rectify that. I guess as the counter example to what you are suggesting I would point at the Linux effort. There, it's pretty clear where the overall architectural direction is coming from and there is a lot of strategy discussion on what the long term architectural goals are. Pieces of that strategy come from many people, but one person (more or less) coordinates the effort. >> As such, I trust Carsten, Stefano and whom-ever to figure most of this >> stuff out without necessarily involving the general Cocoon developer >> community at each point that there is some design decision to be made. > > These are the stages we have been using so far > > - random thoughts > - proposal > - discussion > - implementation > - test > > and only 'proposal' is a single-person effort. I guess what I would changes is that I would add "architecture", "more discussion" and "design" steps between discussion and implementation, and architecture and design would also be single person efforts. Not for everything, but for the large pieces. I think that you are doing this to some extent, but I think it would help to make it explicit. The big thing that seems to be missing is the documentation that would fall out of the architecture and design pieces. Even if it's not complete it at least gives a framework into which the overall documentation can be pieced together. >> Open development sounds like a nice ideal, but perhaps it might be >> more effective to work for benign dictator led development (with the >> understanding that at any point there may be a revolution that gets >> rid of the dictator)... > > No, I think Cocoon proves that open development can be a killer way to > do both research and development and, if run correctly, is not an ideal > but a practical solution. Again, I'm not so sure. If Cocoon goes to the Apache level you're going to see a lot more people jump into the developer boat. The number of people wanting to add functionally it is going to increase by an order of magnitude. Someone has to work to stop Cocoon from becoming a bloated collection of random functionality. Adding blocks will help keep things organized, but now, people will look at the default configuration and think "hmm, I would like to also have this function" and throw something out, not realizing that it is already implemented (perhaps in a completely different way than they imagined) in some other block. I'd really like to see people such as yourself try and keep a firm control of the overall architecture. I guess that also implies going to the effort of documenting it, and I can understand why that might not be as attractive of option as having the "list" (so to speak) be the documentation... ;-) Just in case I haven't made it explicit, I do admire the work that you and all the rest of the Cocoon developers have done to date. I also believe you haven't seen anything yet in the terms of the size the Cocoon community could grow to. There's a fine line between collaboration and anarchy and someone, such as yourself, is going to have to help keep watch over the masses. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
