Jeremias Maerki wrote: > I think you misunderstood. I wanted to suggest transferring (not > copying/forking) these parts over to Apache with you as a > committer in the Commons part. That would make it mostly your > decision. I'm all against duplication of efforts. Actually, > it was the motivation for this post. At Apache you'd have a > bigger audience as well as a bigger chance of finding people > willing to help. And I don't see a big risk for disputes as
I don't mean to be rude or insult anyone, but the help I found at Apache was a net loss. Sure, there is some real help, but it was far outweighed by the hindrances. There is something wrong either with me or the way the FOP community works, maybe both. Of the 18 months that I spent working on FOP, I consider the last 12 of it to have been utterly wasted. Worse, I probably wasted other people's time along the way. There is a steady stream of FOP users who want to contribute to the project who simply cannot find a way to overcome the obstacles that the FOP committers place in front of them. The rather thin constituency that allows me to continue working on open-source publishing software would evaporate if I went down that path again. At the risk of seeming coy or ungrateful (I hope I am neither) it really is not an option for me. As for a bigger audience, I am not worried about that. If we produce something worthwhile, people will find it. > willing to help. And I don't see a big risk for disputes as > there were for the overall approach for FOP. You may be right, but I have reason to doubt it. If what you say were true, FOP would have done a 0.21 release in September that incorporated FOrayFont: a very modest (but real) cost to the project, significant gains to both users and the project, the fairly speedy removal of a whole class of support issues, a test-bed for one actual 1.0 module, modest cleanup of the code base, the opportunity to attract developers to work on a much simpler discrete subsystem, elimination of the *immediate* need for a competing product, etc. IMO, that should have been a slam-dunk, but wasn't. Here is a huge disagreement that has nothing to do with system design at all. As with many other FOP decisions, I am just baffled. > It was just an idea in the hopes of bringing people back > together to work on things with little to no potential for > disagreements. I think we can and should work together, but I see only downside potential to making the relationship as tight as it once was. My philosophy makes ample room for making mistakes ... once. Victor Mote
