Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
Berin Loritsch wrote:
I will continue to be proud of our brand, our product and our
community. And I will continue the work on *Cocoon* towards the
future in an evolutionary way, so that those who have put their
trust in us have a reasonable migration path to follow.
I've put a souple years into Cocoon, and I'm proud of the work that
I've done. I like the *concepts* behind Cocoon. The problem is that
I lack the patience to wait for evolution to take place--how long has
it been that real blocks are not a reality in Cocoon? I could
understand if it were just six months and you have to have some time
to make it happen.
You know Berin, we have blocks. Go and read
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=113335919919804&w=2.
It says something interesting about this community that no one have
responded to that message yet. While a thread about marketing and
branding absorbs all the community energy (again).
:) Yes I know we have a certain implimentation of blocks that require
compiling against the core.
Is Cocoon all about talk and hype? Is design and programming, and god
forbid refactoring and testing, something old fashioned that we better
stop worrying about?
Oh I agree that design, programming, refactoring, and testing are all
extremely important. Any attempt to do a redesign *must* have these
things working if it is to have any hope to succeed. I just believe
that we have gotten to a point where retrofitting these things is going
to take more time and energy than it will to establish them at the
inception of any new efforts.
My friends, the comment of Ruby on Rails and simplicity has hit our
ecosystem. Prepare for an ice age, adapt or die. Slow adaptation
isn't going to cut it. Users have different expectations of their
frameworks now.
I take this painfully slow evolutionary pace to mean that we are
unable to adapt quickly enough. That's a real problem. Esp. when I
don't have a clear picture of how blocks is even going to help me.
Wow! isn't marketing talk fun.
Yes it is. But don't forget to see the substance behind it. The
reality is that the world around us has changed, and ignoring that fact
is just as unhealthy as doing a complete redesign every release.
Still I fail to see a common coherent vision for this revolution
besides that current Cocoon is messy. Sure I have seen that Sylvain
have collected some ideas that we have discussed on the list for a
while. Much of it that great stuff, but is it something that can't be
achieved by refactoring Cocoon? And are they so great so that we
should spread ourselves even thinner instead of focus on getting 2.2
out of the door?
Right, and we do need to solidify the vision. I think the point where
we are is still trying to see if there is enough community support to do
a redesign. Nevertheless, we do need a common vision for Cocoon,
whether that is 2.2, 2.3, 3.0, or X. That way we can be sure that we
are evolving the right direction.
We should focus on our core offerning and getting the parts of it
reusable outside Cocoon and of high quality, following the path
outlined by Marc.
Enjoy that process. There is a lot of pain involved with doing
restructurings of Cocoon. As much as I like Cocoon, I honestly
believe that the effort to bring order out of chaos is going to be
much higher than the effort to build a new system. That's my two cents.
IMO the most important step towards getting an uppwards spiral again
is by regaining our and our communities faith in Cocoon, by keeping
our promisses and do a 2.2 release. Instead of running like lemmlings
towards the next shiny thing.
I don't think anyone has suggested that we abandon 2.2. Yes, we need to
finish 2.2. We need to manage the TODO list for 2.2.
I know about the pain of restructuring Cocoon as I'm have worked with
core related stuff for along time. And getting some proof of concept
code working might not be that hard. But I think that you severly
underestimate the amount of work it will take to get a production
quality system shipping. Not to talk about getting the trust in the
new product when we anounce: "trust us, this time is different, this
time we will behave responsible"
That's why I have always advocated the release early and often mantra.
I think we should institute a monthly early access release, so that we
can get the feedback we need at each stage. I would advocate that
whether the community goes evolutionary, revolutionary, or some hybrid.
