On Friday, June 6, 2003, at 05:54 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote:It's since 31/1/2003 that there has been no real activity on this list. This is IMHO the most interesting part of it: ...My very simple common-sense brain keeps asking... what are we waiting to simply promote Jakarta Commons to project status and make *that* the commons.apache.org project?On Thu, 30 Jan 2003, Aaron Bannert wrote:
The Apache Commons project was definitely inspired by the Jakarta
Commons project, and aims to be the preferred home for old and new
Jakarta Commons projects both in terms of cross-project Java development
and cross-language projects.
-aaron
They have the active people, the tried and tested rules, the activity, the projects, the will, the time, to make Commons really thrive as a project.
Why is this not pursued?
IMHO, things need some focus in order to avoid becoming unbounded, like sourceforge. Keeping Jakarta commons to small reusable components that actually are used by Jakarta projects seems to provide the right level of focus.
There also is a notion of 'closeness' that I think is relevant. Does your community have a park? Mine does. I think the nature of the location would change if it were made a national park.
Or perhaps it simply is inertia. As you point out, Jakarta commons appears to be working.
IMHO both are important factors.
the tightness of the jakarta-commons scope has definitely helped. better components have been created because the components are expected to be tightly scoped and reusable. these rules have been a success and so people are loathed to change them.
jakarta-commons is on the creative cusp between working and not-working. as an insider, we continually have problems with having too many developers but too few committers and too many components with too little infrastructure. but people seem to like it this way. jakarta-commons is really like a bizaar with lots of components all crammed in closely together with lots of people wandering through. everyone say's it's far too busy but no one wants to leave. this creates a lot of inertia.
i have another reason to add to sam's. a change like this would require enough jakarta-commons committers with enough energy to kick start the commons project and make the change a success. i'm not sure that this energy exists within jakarta-commons. at the moment, it's hard enough supervising jakarta-commons and jakarta-commons-sandbox without having to extend the responsibility to a lot of new components written in different languages.
i also would like to see the commons-project prosper but i don't have the energy to make it happen. i think that many other jakarta-commons committers probably feel the same.
- robert
