On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Costin Manolache wrote:
> robert burrell donkin wrote: > > > what we have is clear duplication. twice the support and twice the > > maintenance. > > Nobody asks you to support 2 versions. There is nothing wrong with > duplication ( at least in commons ). You can just maintain and support the > version you like. Nothing illegal with 2 versions anyway. If there are duplicate versions, with no difference in religion between those versions, I would question the rightness. Especially if it came from the same 'group' of developers. [Not that I'm stating that Commons is a group of developers in any way] > >> You're recommending deprecation of a released, public-facing API; Rodney > >> is not. > > > > the (beanutils) MethodUtils API sucks. it was written in haste and now in > > leisure, i regret that it was written in that way. > > It doesn't quite matter. There are people using it ( digester, other > projects), it was released - we have to live with it. We may learn a lesson > about APIs and use it next time, but as long as it does what it is supposed > to do and works - you can't remove it. So work stops on beanutils and BeanUtilsTNG is created? Why can't it be removed? I agree that such a removal should imply a large version number change, ie) BeanUtils 2.0, but what states that Commons libraries have to follow slow-release deprecation methods? > This start to look like dependency spaghetti to me, and it does create > problems. Yep. Reality is we are going to have N libraries with M dependencies, where N and M will only get bigger at a rate slightly faster than we can manage it. Do we need to have a common plan in Commons? Or do we do our best to ensure there are no dependencies between projects, ie) each one is stand-alone and has some kind of copying system for internal function calls [ie) we copy the jar, change the bytecode to a different package name, an obfuscated one]. > > my position has always been that i'm not willing to maintain, support or > > develop two versions of the basic reflection classes. i've also been > > convinced that beanutils is not the right places for these canonical > > versions. > > Good. Then maintain and support the other version. While this kind of view is an important one to have in the community [as detailed in a long thread on jakarta-general or apache-community] in that it helps to deal with potential forking and potential project-death, it does seem that the philosophy should be to work together until such a point as working together is not possible, and then to allow the community-healing mores to come into play. Hen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
