Hi there,
On Jan 31, 2009, at 12:04 AM, Vincent Siveton wrote:
Hi Jason,
2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <ja...@maven.org>:
Howdy,
I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following
the work
that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made
some
attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and
WikiModel. You
can see the proposal here:
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that
reporting
is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.
Having
I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see
MNG-3402.
Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple
releases of
the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.
This will
open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.
Doxia
reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the
functionality just
unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something
new!
Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
- how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
- what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
What I personally think the best path would be is to help what
Vincent has
started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia,
the
releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately
double or
Agree but we work when we have time :)
@Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and
getting the
WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all
the time
and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the
project
as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that
wildly
different but I think you would get more visibility over there and
a higher
The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki
umbrella,
so do you plan to do it?
@Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?
Let me explain the point of view of the xwiki community (I hope I'm
summarizing it well here):
* XWiki is not a wiki. It's a platform offering wiki components to
develop any type of content-centric web application based on the wiki
paradigm.
* We've started reorganizing ourselves to implement this vision back
in 2007. We've started by decoupling our monolithic code into modules
and components (using Plexus).
* We're not finding that there are some important pieces that we want
to make top level projects, independent of the other xwiki modules/
components. For the moment we have identified 2 pieces:
- the rendering engine
- our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor
* We could propose these under new projects at the ASF for example.
These are the reasons preventing us from doing so right now:
- we'd like to promote the XWiki project name as the place where to
get wiki "components". If we start splitting the rendering engine or
the wysiwyg editor we won't achieve this
- having to implement and support several projects (the xwiki one +
the engine one at ASF + the wysiwyg one wherever else
(@code.google.org for ex)) is going to spread our committer base thin
achieving the opposite as what we want to achieve which is making all
people interested on working on wiki "components" together.
- we have a very good infrastructure team and we completely host
all our tools. We like it this way since it's real fast and it works
real well and we can only complain to ourselves if something is not
right and we can fix it right away. Note that the infra is paid by
XWiki SAS (a company offering services on top of the xwiki oss
project
- See http://tinyurl.com/7c488p for more details)
- basically we can work faster if the code is on the xwiki svn
It's possible that one day we'll propose the whole project to the ASF
but I don't think we're ready for that yet. For the moment we like it
the way we are able to progress fast and we don't feel the need.
Note that xwiki projects are currently under the LGPL but we can
discuss making the new rendering engine (which would be the merge
between doxia, xwiki and wikimodel ) under the ASL if you feel this
is
better.
Now why are we interested in merging them all? Actually that wasn't
our idea. It was Jason's. We were fine developing and progressing
fast
on our own xwiki rendering engine. But at the same time it's true
that
I've realized it was a pity that XWiki/WikiModel and Doxia are re-
developing the same things instead of collaborating and working on
building something together. So I see 2 win-win advantages for us
all:
- for Doxia this can be a way to make it live on and be active again,
with even more features and better support
- for XWiki we would love to get some new committers on board to help
us with the rendering engine (we currently have about 3 committers
active on it either full time or part time). In addition the merge
between these 3 engines (xwiki/wikimodel/doxia) would create a new
rendering engine that could easily be the best rendering engine on
the
web. For us one advantage would be to spread the xwiki name even more
and thus get more contributors and users of the xwiki "components"
and
applications.
Last, while I see it very interesting to everyone to perform this
merge, I can understand if some people would prefer to continue
working on what they do on their side without merging. That's fine
and
I'm not going to fight for doing the merge at all cost. Especially
since doing the merge is going to be costly for us in term of time/
effort. For it to be worthwhile we must all agree to it and like the
idea.
So what happens if the merge isn't done? On the xwiki side we'll
continue to improve our rendering engine fast (we're progressing very
fast right now since we have very active committers and since the
rendering is actively used in all the xwiki applications this will
continue). Even though we have a Doxia bridge we're not using it for
different reasons but one of them is that the Doxia parsers we've
tried were not good enough. I remember trying the confluence one and
it was very buggy. So I was just waiting for the need to use the
confluence parser to arise before rewriting it using wikimodel
(it's a
one day job at max to get a very strong parser, thanks to wikimodel
tools).
Merging has its share or work required on both sides but it's the
best
option in the end IMO. Now it's for you to decide if this has enough
interest for Doxia.
Cheers,
-Vincent
PS: If you want to see how the xwiki project is managed read
http://tinyurl.com/7c488p and go to http://dev.xwiki.org which
contains all
our dev practices
Cheers,
Vincent
degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is
more
complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this
list.
Thanks,
Jason
