On 2008.01.21., at 9:30, Marc Guillemot wrote:

> Hi,
>
> first I don't want to offend committers (btw: who are you?)

No offense taken. People most likely to commit something these days  
are Norris Boyd, David P. Caldwell, and myself. Igor Bukanov is also  
nominally still a committer, but he's absent from the project for  
about two years now. (Which doesn't necessarily mean anything --  
Norris was also away for quite long before he could fortunately return).

> who may work
> hard on E4X or JS 1.7 support for instance: as I'm not currently
> interested in these features, I don't know how active are this  
> areas. My
> comment concerns only "normal", current features.
>
>
> It seems to me that the Rhino project is currently a bit asleep. It's
> not a good news for us (HtmlUnit) but there is no progress on many
> issues that matter for us, even when patches are provided. I don't  
> await
> that problems get immediately fixed but there is nothing worst than  
> silence.

Norris seems to concentrate on JS 1.7 currently, but he's committing  
other patches too. David's primary area is E4X, but he is able to help  
out elsewhere as well.

I myself am having a bit of guilty conscience as I can't seem to find  
time lately to tend to Rhino's Bugzilla. Every now and then I'll go  
through Bugzilla, review patches, and commit them. I haven't been able  
to do such a "patch sweep" since end of October though. I'm aware we  
have a lots of patches piled up in Bugzilla, but life is constantly  
getting in the way of me spending my free time on reviewing them for  
quite long now. I'm not being apologetic, it's just the way life is  
now. I'm looking forward to review and commit those patches as soon as  
I can, which I know isn't much of a promise... As soon as I will have  
time, I will go through the patches, especially knowing that there are  
people out there who depend on it.

I recognize HtmlUnit as a valuable user of Rhino -- you are basically  
our "go to" target where we send people asking how do they do HTML DOM  
in Rhino, which is a quite significant added value as lots of people  
seem to want to be able to do that.

> Of course we (HtmlUnit again) can fork / patch / adapt the Rhino  
> version
> that we use. This is an option that we seriously consider but we would
> prefer an healthy Rhino project that accepts the improvements we may
> propose because maintaining a patched version requires a lot of
> additional work.

That's correct. I do understand your concerns however.

> How do you see Rhino's future?

It's empirically proven that we need more active committers :-). I'm  
trying to recruit talent from time to time - that's how David came to  
the project. I also had someone turning down an invitation, which of  
course I also have to respect. If someone is prolific in submitting  
patches to Bugzilla, and they show a good understanding of the  
codebase, then after a while it's less hassle to offer commit access  
than to keep reviewing the patches. But I definitely need another  
patch sweep cycle before deciding on this. Or input from other  
committers who do it.

Attila.


> Cheers and long life to the beast,
> Marc.
> -- 
> Blog: http://mguillem.wordpress.com

_______________________________________________
dev-tech-js-engine-rhino mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-rhino

Reply via email to