Aye, it's an open list, say what you want. I will too. The features
that have been ignored for so long are features I didn't even want
supported in the first place. The bugs I needed fixed, were fixed.
Which is great because I didn't have to pay anyone for that.
Maybe I don't get what you're driving at, but seems to me when someone
comes in complaining about how slow everything moves, they've missed the
point. It's like jumping onto some stranger's bike and then tapping him
on the shoulder and saying "Hey buddy, can you pick it up? I've got a
meeting to go to."
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
