We have recently discussed the idea of keeping all the specialpurpose components in the trunk, remove them from future release branches (starting with 13.04 that will probably still contain the ecommerce component because a lot unit tests are based on demo data in it and because of some other minor dependencies) but considering them as "optional", meaning that the community may not maintain them updated. This seems to be a good compromise between the advantage for the community to have a smaller codebase to maintain to a good quality level (taking care of bug fix releases etc...) and the interest in keeping in the official trunk some specialized/experimental code that may be of interest to smaller groups or that could be resurrected over time. I would like to go ahead with this plan and disable (i.e. remove from the default build/test process and disable as components) the following two components: "crowd" and "birt". The main reason is that they both require the very old Axis "1" jar files (published in 2006) that are now in the framework/service component and are not used anymore because a few years ago we upgraded the core components to "Axis 2". In short I would like to: 1) remove the old "Axis 1" jars from the framework 2) disable "crowd" and "birt" components so that they are excluded by the compile task by default; all the code will stay in the trunk If someone is interested in upgrading them then we could re-enable them at a later point (even if there are other disadvantages in both components that we should address).
WDYT? Jacopo
