On Thu, May 28, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Antonio Petrelli <antonio.petre...@gmail.com> wrote: > Please don't complain, but maintain. You can fork it in Github, participate > with patches, you can even publish your fork (changing its name). > I was working for Velocity some years ago, remember that most of us are not > paid by anyone to do this work, we are all volunteers. Apache projects are > not made "by professionals", although someone invests money on them, but > it's not always this way.
I've been kicking around the ASF for a decade. I'm an ASF member and the PMC chair of MyFaces. I know how the ASF software development process works. But when repository branches do not build from source, releases do not build from source, and no one seems to be around to suggest how it's supposed to work, the Velocity development team destroys the ability to attract and maintain new community members, which can only lead to the project's slow death and migration to the Attic. There's a reason why one of the few ASF release requirements is that the release be buildable from source at the ASF, and Velocity unfortunately dropped the ball without anyone noticing. Note, I have a great deal of respect for the various people who worked on Velocity over the years, and these things happen unintentionally, and I'm not looking to blame anyone. I started to submit some patches to fix backward-compatibility issues in the velocity grammar last year, but only Claude responded to my attempts to work through the inability to rebuild velocity's grammar and apply those patches, and he wasn't able to help despite his attempts. Because we are volunteers, we can only take things so far before other items take precedence, and we give up and move on. I considered writing a message like this last year, but since I didn't have the time to follow through at that moment, and no one else seemed interested in further development, it didn't seem right for me to bring it up. But now, while my time is still limited, there are at least a couple of other people who are expressing interest. I'm hoping that we can somehow get things back on track by identifying what's preventing further contributions. For me, it's the inability to fix the grammar <tab> bug due to the inability to regenerate the java grammar files. If that process was somehow documented, I could help out in other areas, knowing that it would eventually result in meeting my Velocity usage needs. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@velocity.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@velocity.apache.org
