So I'm thinking of raising the issue of moving over to Apache Commons to projects I am a committer on. I have to convince myself and others that it is a good thing. So why is it a good thing?
It seems to me that if I assume the following to be true [from my point of view]: 1) Sharing a mailing list with other languages is not going to help me. It might help tomcat and httpd, but not the areas I'm involved in. If I were sharing with a C# set of programmers there might be some reuse/synergy, but as my particular area of charm is utility libraries that are missing from standard-java [ie JDK], then it's hard to see much linkage with C, tcl or perl [which are what I consider to be the other languages at Apache. PHP is, but I don't believe it to be that modular in build. Could easily be wrong. ]. I've looked at APR to nick ideas for Java utilities. It really just doesn't map, there's so much noise of things that are low level, ie) memory management etc. Now, it would be nice to be able to go 'hmmmm.. what would be a nice algorithm for this search' etc, but that's pretty rare. Also a hard thing to do across language as people end up arguing about language. 2) Sharing a CVS module will be painful, that is, there is no benefit and some minor deficit. What do I get out of being in a cvs tree that means I have to check tons of stuff out that I don't use? [slightly bombastic, I can avoid checking it out with knowledge]. 3) Sharing a website will be painful, that is, it will cost lots of effort and give little back. 4) Sharing a build-system will be impossible/painful. Same for a coding standard. Once those four axioms are accepted, there is no project community, and therefore no point for the apache-commons project? What else does Apache-commons offer? Now, if there are no other things on the bargaining table, then which ones of those are ones that Apache-Commons will _not_ budge on? Hen
