on 6/24/03 3:48 PM Christopher Oliver wrote: > Although I think it would be nice to sync with the Rhino cvs, I can tell > you from personal experience that the Rhino code at cocoondev.org is > more stable than Cocoon itself at this point. > > So I think trying to place the blame on Rhino for not using the flow is > misguided. > > You also need to take into account that the Cocoon community is much > stronger than the one supporting Rhino. Basically there are only two > Rhino committers, Igor Bukanov and Norris Boyd, and only one (Igor) is > currently active.
You raise a really interesting point: what if synching back increases our political comfort but reduces our ability to control the software? I, for one, would not trade political comfort for software control. But in that case, our fork must be made explicit and the project name changed. I'm not sure I want that, also because it would shade a really bad light on us that kept on the fork without asking for convergence. You say that Cocoon's is a healthier community than Rhino. It's not hard to imagine, also given the limited scope (and use) of Rhino inside the mozilla organization. Now, it can be possible to propose a migration of Rhino into Apache, but would that really make sense? I think that the option of "active and direct" collaboration between Cocoon and Rhino would be better for both. It might increase their community, create a solid political link (that today is missing), give us a meritocratic control on the platform (cocoon is probably going to become one of the most important rhino customers). So, it might be good to start talking to them *before* we even attempt to do anything from a code perspective, maybe they have ideas on how to solve things easily or maybe even converge to a common point. In the past, Chris talked to them as a simple committer that added non-standard features on Rhino before it changed incompatibly. Today, we can approach them as a massive and well known development community that is willing to do whatever it takes to avoid a fork on rhino that might break their user base in two and therefore hurt both sides. The political impact is *way* different, their reaction this time might be as well. We don't want to harm Rhino, but we might well end up doing it if the two branches are not synched back. Chris alone didn't create much of a forking threat for Rhino, Cocoon seriosly does. This means that it's not only *our* interest to keep things in synch (as it was only Chris' in the past), but it might well become *their* interest as well, as we put much more pressure as a visible and recognized community. So, I suggest that we explain to them what the problem is, propose our solution and see how the react and what they have to propose back, hopefully willing to settle on a common ground to avoid the fork. We won't use the fork as a threat, it's not our intention, but if we don't synch back, shit may happen and we want to avoid it. What do you think? -- Stefano.
