I concur, GREAT WORK.
I'm a bit of a newbie to ECS/Java (in general) and yes, it would be nice to
have all of the bells and whistles of a commercial product in ECS. But the
reality of the situation is that it's FREE, and even more amazing IT WORKS!
So, any documentation is a boon, even the javadoc'd stuff. Also Jon on
many occasions has answered questions as only the developer of a project
could (e.g. far more directly than any manual). When was the last time
anyone was able to talk directly to the developers of a commercial project?
At any rate GREAT JOB on a GREAT product.
Michael Wilson
Software Engineer
SONY PICTURES IMAGEWORKS
email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard McKinley [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2000 10:25 AM
To: 'ECS'
Subject: RE: Rant about documentation, WAS: Building the example
I am new to Java but I have found that a Class Browser and a peak at the
source code is all I need for a product like ECS. Documentation would
be nice, but I can't say I would have read it anyway. The Test Build
didn't work for me either, but I was able to debug it or at least remove
the broken parts. Then I started WRITING PAGES, never having to look at
<HTML> unreadability again. KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK ECS TEAM!
-----Original Message-----
From: jon * [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2000 10:22 AM
To: ECS
Subject: Re: Rant about documentation, WAS: Building the example
Simon,
What you don't understand is that this is an OS project. Let me explain
some
basic concepts to you...
We the developers spend many hundreds and thousands of hours working on
these projects writing the best code we can. It takes donations from
others
to help us finish them. In a commercial world like BEA, there are people
who
are English majors who like computers who's job it is to spend all day
long
documenting this stuff. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of
hiring
people to sit around and do newbie documenation. As developers, we do
our
best to document the code and provide Javadoc as well as provide working
stable code. It is up to other people to help us finish up the rest of
the
project documentation. We are way to intimately familiar with the code
to
provide a high level set of documentation for this stuff...the best that
we
can do is provide the things like the TestBed.java class which exercises
about 99% of the core functionality of ECS. If it doesn't compile
because it
is missing some classes, we kind of expect the users to be resourceful
enough to either get the right classes or simply comment out the parts
that
are not needed for that period of time.
As it stands, there is 216 people on this mailing list right now. It is
totally unfortunate that not one single one of those people is willing
to
stand up, help out and provide more documentation (what are you people
doing
on this list???). Expecting us to do this entire project (I work on
about 10
different OS projects + my day job) AND provide newbie documentation is
unfortunately far beyond my capabilities...
So, I apologize for falling short for you.
-jon
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