Jason Pettiss wrote:
I agree the @author tags discussion is idiotic but it's not my list.
Nor is it yours. Be curious about motivations if you like but in that
case just email the people you want to talk to. I have to follow this
list, because I do use Velocity, and have modified it for my own
purposes. The noise you introduce is amusing but not altogether welcome.
Look, my comments in this discussion (a discussion which you yourself
consider "idiotic" apparently) were in response to Henning telling Ahmed
Mohombe that Ahmed should offer patches if he is not happy with the rate
of progress in this project. (This, in a project, with a significant
history of just ignoring contributed patches...) So I asked Henning
whether he is really interested in being involved in this thing -- I
mean, it just doesn't make any sense...
As for that comment of mine not being altogether welcome, well, I'm sure
that's the case, and it's hardly surpising...
But... the lack of progress is real. If somebody like Henning doesn't
really want to work on the project and doesn't want anybody even
pointing out that the thing is pretty stagnant, then nobody forced him
to volunteer to be involved in the thing in the first place. I think the
question I posed is something that would have crossed the minds of
practically anybody reading the exchange: "Why on earth is this guy even
involved in the project?"
Now, that my asking that question (that probably occurred to you) or me
pointing out that aspects of the @author tags discussion were idiotic
(which, I guess, did definitely occur to you, since you apparently think
so as well) may make you uncomfortable. However, you really have to
understand my goal in life is not to enhance your comfort level, Jason.
Basically, I'll say whatever I feel like saying in a public forum --
forthrightly and honestly, and within the range of what is broadly on-topic.
Anyway, bugs are fixed readily,
You can quibble about the definition of "readily" but I don't think
that's remotely true. I sort of keep one eye on what is going on here,
and it seems to me that there were well known bugs that were not fixed
for periods of years.
It's not exactly a bug-fix, but the patch for map creation offered in
late 2002 was a new feature introduced in 2007. A guy contributed a
patch (really, quite a trivial one) and it took over 4 years for it to
make it into a stable release. (IN that kind of context, to be asking
people to "shut up and send in patches" does not make much sense. There
has to be some commitment to reviewing the patches and acting on them in
some reasonable time period, doesn't there?)
Or, you know, look at the state of the whitespace issue. What about a
lot of the bugs related to velocimacros. I mean, these are amazing bugs
to persist for years. FreeMarker is far from perfect, but probably any
of those bugs, we would consider to be a show stopper and would not have
any releases without fixing them. These kinds of things persist for
years, and over entire release cycles here.
responses to questions provided even
more so. So it is very much "maintained" software. The fact that it
hasn't needed a lot of releases and point-patches is a huge plus in my
book.
Okay, and less is more, worse is better.... fine, be my guest...
Besides, it's not true that they don't have new releases. Look, just
today they just had a new release of Anakia!!! ;-)
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Jason Pettiss wrote:
Wow is it really that time of year already? It's time for the Annual
Revusky Flamewar! Yay!
Jason, in the message you are responding to, I asked Henning
Schmiedehausen very specifically about his motives for being involved
in this project. As far as I can tell, the only person who could
respond to that is Henning himself.
The reason I posed the question was because, AFAICS, his behavior, and
basically that of the other people who are ostensibly involved in this
project, is not consistent with actually being genuinely interested in
the problem space -- or being genuinely interested in working on the
tool in question.
Jonathan: they're talking about removing the @author tags because, as
you guessed, there IS an international conspiracy! But what you
don't know is you're the center of it all!!! This goes beyond
software Jonathan-- they're watching your every move, waiting for the
perfect moment to strike. It all starts with @author tags. Just wait.
I simply pointed out that the reasoning offered for wanting to remove
the @author tags was quite tenuous, to say the least. When people
provide very strange reasons for wanting to do something, reasons that
do not seem to make sense, I (and I cannot be the only one) will tend
to suspect that the real reasons are different from the ones they are
stating.
I mean, one "advantage" to removing the @author tags is that, if the
@author tags are there, anybody can see that all the people who did
any real heavy lifting in this project, and wrote any real code, are
long gone. (Anything else done since those people left has been nth
order maintenance coding.) With the @author tags gone, that is less
obvious. IOW, it is just part of making it a bit less obvious what
state of abandonment the project is actually in.
Now, that may not be the real reason that they want to remove the
@author tags, and maybe the above-expressed suspicions show a bad side
of me, my tendency to see underhandedness in what people do. However,
the expressed reasons for wanting to remove the @author tags are also
rather hard to believe, and that would tend to elicit suspicions,
wouldn't it?
Ahem.
JSP still dominates the world of enterprise Java. Even though it was
obsolete years ago, technologically inferior for a long time, and a
royal PITA to support. And should I point out that by your
standards, it was a dead, inactive project circa 2001? So why is it
so widely used?
That's a rhetorical question, I hope. I mean, we both know that the
reason that JSP is so dominant is marketing/placement. I can't see
what fruitful discussion can be had about that.
OTOH, as for it being dead/inactive, that's NOT the case. In the
period since the original authors of Velocity abandoned the project, a
lot of improvements have been made to the JSP spec. Okay, it may seem
that progress has been a bit slow, but this is something that comes
from a major corporation, so it's not directly comparable to an OSS
project. JSP has come a long way since its early days.
Meanwhile Velocity has always been a popular alternative and in my
opinion a superior one. Doesn't matter the experience level of the
user: they always enjoy using Velocity more than JSP and get quite
annoyed when they have to go back and support the old
servlets/taglibs/include files/tag files/pre-compilation garbage.
Velocity is:
- Ideal for rapid development
- Suitable for non-technical users
- Simple: very nice learning curve
Oh and, as of 1.4 anyway, was simple enough that I was not hesitant
to adopt it, because the codebase was so small and straight-forward
that if I needed to make it quirky, I could.
Jason, if you know full well that the project is basically abandoned
and are willing to use it anyway, since, as you say, you find the code
small and straight-forward enough that you can maintain/hack it
yourself, that is all fine.... for you...
However, that does not make it justifiable for people to be trying to
mislead others about the true state of the project. Other people, if
the state of the project is honestly disclosed, may decide that they
prefer to depend on something that really is being actively maintained
and developed.
FreeMarker is a nice product but the grammar is already so darn
quirky that I'm pretty sure the code is tangled enough that I might
think twice about messing with it. Also FreeMarker is so freaking
anal retentive, which defeats the reason I moved to a lightweight
template language in the first place.
Velocity 1.5 is gaining some good features but is also getting a
little quirky. That, I don't like. Regardless, my users are still
going to prefer
#if( $foo > 42 )
#end
over
<#if foo > 42>
</#if>
and that's just how it goes. Even if the latter makes more 'sense'.
Well, the fact of the matter is that, as best I (or anybody) can tell
from googling around and such, just about everybody who has seriously
evaluated Velocity and FreeMarker ends up choosing FreeMarker. This is
backed up by the fact that, easily half or more of the people on the
freemarker-user list seem to be ex-Velocity users. I do not get any
similar sense that the Velocity community is populated by
ex-FreeMarker users.
Also, there are high profile OSS projects that used Velocity, like
Webwork and Hibernate-tools, that switched over to FreeMarker. There
is no case that I know of, of a project like that, equally high
profile or not, switching in the opposited direction from FreeMarker
to Velocity. All the movement has been in the other direction. Just
for example:
http://blog.nominet.org.uk/tech/2005/06/29/moving-from-velocity-to-freemarker/
I do not believe you can find any similar blog articles where anybody
explains why they switched in the other direction. In fact, the only
case I can find of a switch from FreeMarker to Velocity is this one:
http://www.howardism.org/thoughts/001511.html
And this guy found Velocity so frustrating after having used
FreeMarker, that he then switched back! :-)
You might now want to claim I cherry-picked the above examples, but
they are just typical of the overall trend. It's just facts, and they
point towards the same conclusion. It is what the objective verifiable
evidence indicates at this point: people who have used both tools
overwhelmingly prefer FreeMarker.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
--jason
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
Ahmed Mohombe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Basically removing all the @author tags from the velocity code base
and docs and replacing it with 'Velocity development community'
and a
link to the dev-list.
How about doing this?
-1 from me as a user.
In a lot of projects when I had problems, I was able to ask
directly the author(s)
of that class/utility, and this was very helpful. The complete
project was too big
and the work of just too many people.
Yes, and this is excactly what we want to get rid of. None of the code
is owned by any of us and sometimes the person named in the source is
not even any longer around. That is the whole point of community.
If you want to know, which committer wrote a specific line of code
(which is much more interesting than who is mentioned in a file), use
svn blame or the subversion viewer. That is what tools are there for.
Why don't you people concentrate on important things, e.g. like
performance?
Send a patch. The idea of a community is not "a few people slaving
away and the rest sitting in the popcorn stands booing and cheering".
The person you're addressing here, Ahmed Mohombe, is an active
contributor to at least 2 other open source projects. He has chosen
to contribute his energies elsewhere. You, on the other hand, wanted
to be involved in this project, so for somebody like Ahmed to tell
you that your record in terms of moving the thing forward is rather
poor, this is understandably unpleasant for you, but to be
responding that the other guy should be doing the work does not
strike me as legitimate.
If you have an itch, scratch it. Send a patch. We are happy to apply.
The fact is that there is a long history here of people sending in
patches and nothing happening for years. The latest 1.5 release
finally incorporates a patch offered by one James Taylor in October
of 2002 for supporting map creation.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.velocity.devel/1245
Yep, that's one of the new features in Velocity 1.5 released in 2007.
The decimal numbers stuff was offered as a patch around the same
time, I think. So, okay, you can say that these patches eventually
made it in, but we're talking about a turnaround of over 4 years.
My guess is that if any patch, at least anything particularly
significant was contributed by Ahmed or anybody else, it would not
get reviewed in any reasonable time. In any case, your record on
this is so poor that it seems disingenuous to be starting with this
"where's your patch" sort of rhetoric.
Of course, asking people in this insistent, aggressive tone "where's
your patch", when they bring up whatever criticism... that is, I
guess, part of the "Apache Way" (though by convention, not a written
part of it, I grant...)
Do you really think the users do care so much about "cosmetics"
when the concurrent products/technologies get real improvements?
At least I do not really care about 'products' or 'technologies'. If
you have a need that the community can not solve, hire a consultant
who can. There are plenty around.
<sigh>
Henning, why are you involved in this at all?
I mean, normally, at least it seems to me, if you get involved in an
open source project, it's in some basic problem space that you're
interested in, and you are interested in working on it, the various
intellectual challenges and so on.
Now, in the case of Velocity, it's hard to see why anybody would be
interested for those basic reasons, since it is so technically
obsolete. I mean, Velocity is not competitive with versions of
FreeMarker, its main competitor, from 5 years ago. Velocity, as a
project, has not moved forward in any real way for years. Probably
the entire 1.4 and 1.5 release cycles that took 4 years or more,
embody an amount of work that a single motivated hacker would do in
a matter of a couple of weeks.
But really, I follow this list and do not get any sense that you
guys are really interested in the problem space in any real way. So,
if that really is the case, why are people like you, Will, Nathan,
involved in this project? You're so intent on doing this puttering
around, rooting around in abandonware like Anakia that some guy
wrote 5 or 6 years ago and putting out some kind of "new release".
And the intent seems to be to maintain some illusion that the
project is not really in the abandoned state it is.
But the whole thing is cringingly painful to observe really. It's
like extremely unmotivated employees in some government sinecure
job, puttering around doing nth order things, having meetings, and
so on, trying to look busy -- and also expressing all kinds of
outrage when somebody points out that they aren't really doing
anything, but even that is a kind of empty "going through the
motions" sort of thing.
But why bother? When some unmotivated employee sits up straight and
tries to look awake and busy when some poo-bah is in the vicinity...
that behavior is understandable, of course. But this is an
all-volunteer thing, for crying out loud. If you don't want to do
anything, just don't volunteer for the thing, and spend the time on
some other hobby, something you are actually genuinely interested in
and enjoy. I mean, it doesn't really make any sense.
Now, I really resent all this because of the overall dynamics of it.
You guys spend all this energy pretending that you have this active
project. Basically you leverage the fact that, once upon a time,
some guys wrote a half-decent web server called Apache, and now all
kinds of people believe that anything with Apache in the name must
be great, in order to waste people's time with obsolete stuff.
If you guys had anything remotely competitive with the current state
of the art in this space, and were genuinely interested in working
on this, I would refrain from making the above comments. And, yeah,
it's politically incorrect for me to say these things, but I don't
really care. I'm satisfied that it is right and proper to make these
observations and ask these basic questions.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Best regards
Henning
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