Niklas, Brett, Trygve & all,
Things were stagnating a little bit end of last year. I am happy to see that things are in motion again. Last interesting initiative was Brett's idea to start with an API sketch. I think it is a good start but it's only solving the start Process feature. That's the low level building block. We ought to provide more (otherwise we are just JDK 1.5 equivalent and that's not interesting to me). See my past mails (expesially 'vision....') for more info. Below is a list of past emails that contain information relative to the subject. [exec] Design of commons-exec http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.commons.devel/69584 I listed there a list of high level requirements that I want to keep in mind when designing the library. [exec] API, implementation various notes http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.commons.devel/72242 Those mails are maybe too long to read, if you can only read one, pick the second in the thread. There I compared the various APIs (JD 1.4, JDK 1.5, old common-exec). This is an important point to remember when making the API sketch. After those mails I refactored the existing commons-exec code according to the vision I had proposed. I also did integrate the refactored library into the CruiseControl code (which has about 30 code points that can make use of commons-exec). The refactoring ended up here: http://moca.dynalias.com/~jerome/projects/exec2/ (Unfortunately it seems like I messed up apache access rights, but I should make this code available tomorrow). [Someone told me at some point that I should send this refactoring as a serie of patches. I can do it now if we think it is worth doing.] This code is important to keep in mind. It keeps the past working code, it has a cleaner interface (although not perfect) and it is integrated with an existing project. To me it's better than an API sketch (although the API sketch is a very nice complement, because it is fresh and untangled). After that I sent a mail based on my experience from the refactoring. [exec] vision for the library http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.commons.devel/72295 (once again a long read...) [Exec] API sketch http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.commons.devel/77425 And now the latest emails related to the new API sketch. So here's what I propose to do: - decide which requirements are important. What is the problem we are trying to solve? How do we position us compared to the official's API? etc... Someone using SDK 1.4 or 1.5 should find a compelling reason to migrate to commons-exec. The migration should be intuitive. Benefits for migrating clear. I think I exposed my ideas in the thread about the library's vision. - we compare the clean API sketch to the refactoring I made in September. We focus on making this API easy to use and remember without compromise on flexibility. - we then take a decision on how to reach an implementation that satisfies this API (Either start from the API sketch, or from the refactorings I made 4 months ago). I don't care on the approach as long as we get things moving and that efforts are not wasted. Niklas you said you could coordinate. I offered my help for coding, documentation and tests. There's already a lot of work done on that. Who else is interested? How do we proceed? Niklas I let you answer those questions. Let's try not to loose the momentum. I just don't want my efforts to be wasted (so far they haven't been productive enough to my taste). I would really like this library to be in early alpha by end of February. So I can get it off the list of things I said I would do. Cheers, Jerome --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
