Building on sand ----------------
We developped a habit of building on sand.
Recently on avalon-dev I expressed my concerns about their habit of moving stuff around for elegance-sake, but I'm starting to think that Cocoon is abusing avalon and this places too much pressure on their shoulders.
Example: the instrumentation. The Cocoon core is based on code that has never been released. So, Avalon has the right to move it around (and screw us). But I don't think it's *their* fault, it's entirely ours.
I'm starting to think that the Cocoon dev team should create a policy
+------------------------------------------------------+ | never commit code that depends on non-released stuff | +------------------------------------------------------+
Another example: the Source stuff moved to Avalon.
Is it possible that things are marked as *deprecated* and even Cocoon itself depends on deprecated stuff? sand on sand.
Huge library dependance -----------------------
Let's look at the list of libraries we depend on:
why do we depend on different 'concurrent' libraries?
why do we have altRMI stuff over in /lib/optional when they are needed by the instrumentation that is placed on /lib/core? wouldn't it be core itself?
do we really have to depend on *THREE* different xpath libraries (xalan,jxpath and jaxen)? can't we make an avalon component that provides xpath querying services and work from there?
why do we need both 'excalibur-logger' and 'commons-logging'? didn't we refactor the log?
why we depend on cornerstone-excalibur-thread*?
Scratchpad considered harmful -----------------------------
I proposed to remove the scratchpad and no consensus was reached. I try again but this time harder: I think the scratchpad is harmful.
Reasons:
1) for non-core stuff, alpha blocks will do just fine and will even keep libraries out of the way.
2) if you want to try things around with core stuff, I *WANT* you to do it on the head. It's called 'continous integration'. No, dude, I won't make it easier for you, I want it to make it harder so that everybody sees what you're doing and can improve on it.
I repeat my proposal to kill the scratchpad
enough for now. i need food.
-- Stefano Mazzocchi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate [William of Ockham] --------------------------------------------------------------------
