Norris has written that there have been some major commits from Steve Yegge lately and I could understand that some patches sit idle waiting for that work to be finished. It would be a shame if some patches need reworking after those changes but that's life, I suppose. Anyway if there have been major changes recently then the project doesn't seem dead.
I am planning on using Rhino for a real project and investing a lot of time learning Rhino and would certainly like to know it has a healthy life, for example, evolving into an ECMAScript 3.1 implementation as that spec is finalized. (I remember Steve Yegge wrote Rhino would be ECMAScript 4 compliant by the end of 2008 but that, of course, went out the window when ECMAScript 4 did. (Odd there are no posts in the group archives by Yegge. (And what about that book on Rhino he and Norris were writing?))) I'm not a Rhino committer or even contributor yet but I have recently submitted some trivial patches (documentation etc). If they are successfully committed and there seems to be a general interest in more like them then I'll happily make them as I have time. As I get to know the code I'll hopefully be able to contribute more serious patches. I'd like to do whatever I can to help Rhino improve as long as my effort seems to be worth my time. If they just sit there forever then I'll find other things to do with my time. I know Rhino is being used successfully for several substantial free software projects but I think it is fair to say that those projects don't have a "tipping point" worth of interested developers. JRuby can pull developers from the Rails extravaganza, for example. If it wasn't for Rails then it is likely that Ruby, nevermind JRuby, wouldn't even be popular. I think either Rhino hasn't found its "killer app" to get people interested or that JavaScript on the server-side is not appealing as we would like to think it is. I'm trying to help fix these issues by blogging about it and my free software Rhino project. Here is a link not as a plug but just to show there are more people (i.e. me) interested: http://peter.michaux.ca/index#Server-Side%20JavaScript As is the case with most projects, it would be great to see a more vibrant Rhino project. Peter On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 12:34 PM, Marc Guillemot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Norris, David & Hannes, (*) > > at the beginning of the year I've asked in this list if the project was > half asleep. Now I rather think that its state narrows the clinical dead. > > It seems to me that improvements in the project occur only occasionally > when the personal interest of some committer is involved. The number of > open bugs without any sign of life of any Rhino committer is high. > Particularly alarming, *even issues with patch (and unit test) are > totally ignored*. This really gives the very displeasing impression that > users don't matter at all. I've tried to contribute to improve the > situation but a rhino is a heavy beast and it is not particularly > pleasant to find (nearly) only silence. > As Attila wrote that he would "welcome if [you] could attract new > developers", I've mentioned my interest but except Attila, none of the > committers even react to it. I can understand that you find that I don't > have the skills for the project and I don't care to be refused, but I've > found this absolute lack of reaction offending. This is something that I > haven't seen in any other project. > > It is OK for me if you consider Rhino as your personal project that > should work only for your particular usage and when you don't care > if/how it is used elsewhere. This is rather uncommon for an open source > project, but I can accept it. In this case please mention it explicitly > to avoid wrong expectations. > > Rhino has a far longer history than most other dynamic languages on the > JVM, nevertheless if you compare its activity with the one of projects > like Groovy, JRuby or Jython for instance, it looks really bad for > Rhino. It's a pity because this surely a point that users have to > consider when they have to choose between languages. > > I guess that this post won't change things at all (and perhaps even > motivate committers to create a filter that automatically deletes my > posts ;-)) and that Rhino will continue to vegetate. I really hope to be > wrong, but the evolution of the situation over the last months makes me > really pessimistic. > > Cheers, > Marc. > > (*) as far as I know, Attila is still a committer but my critics are not > addressed to him as he is the only one who is really present in this list. > > -- > Web: http://www.efficient-webtesting.com > Blog: http://mguillem.wordpress.com > _______________________________________________ > dev-tech-js-engine-rhino mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-rhino > _______________________________________________ dev-tech-js-engine-rhino mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-rhino
