I'll throw in my 2¥.  I see two things as untenable:

1. One incubator project with a bunch of widgets.  I know it's
convenient to have one project to build to get all the cool bits, but
the reality is that each of those bits has a different maintainer with
different levels of commitment (and time) to getting it current with
the trunk.

2. Committing to support plural versions of GWT with a non-branched
incubator.  If the incubator branches with the gwt trunk, users can
have some assurances that everything will work for a given version of
GWT -- save defects in said projects.

I'm actually for giving the whack-a-mole process a go, with projects
living (independently) until they are merged or die a natural death.
Once merged, the project should be deleted or otherwise marked as
stopped.  Truly abandoned projects will either be adopted by someone
who cares, or will suffer bitrot.  Either way, there would be no
commitment to keep them current.

Maybe with the lessened guarantees, fewer people will choose to employ
such projects, but my gut says that when you need a PagingScrollTable
you'll take one where you can get it.

-Brett

On Sep 15, 11:26 am, Isaac Truett <itru...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Bruce,
>
> I pondered this topic over the weekend. I don't think I have enough
> information right now to arrive at a better solution. I honestly
> thought until Wednesday that the incubator was working well. I
> understand that things look different from the inside.
>
> Ray said last week that the new direction was going to be developing
> widgets in GWT trunk or in separate projects. I assume that means
> there will be throw-away projects for new widgets or groups of widgets
> that will last until the code is incorporated into GWT trunk. On the
> pro side, that would mean you're not bound to long term backwards
> compatibility or supporting the dead-ends that hang around in the
> incubator but are still used by a few people. But if the pace of new
> development is fast enough, I could see it turning into a game of
> whack-a-mole with new projects popping up and disappearing rapidly. I
> think one of the advantages of having a single incubator project is
> that users can build one project and get access to all of those
> experimental widgets at once.
>
> On a side note, a couple of other people have discovered the
> StyleInjector change:
>
> http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/issues/detail?i...http://code.google.com/p/google-web-toolkit-incubator/wiki/MakingIncu...
>
> I'm not sure what to tell them at this point. I think at the very
> least the wiki needs to be clarified.
>
> - Isaac
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Bruce Johnson <br...@google.com> wrote:
> > We've been a little ambivalent about how well the incubator is working --
> > it's taken a lot longer to things to move into trunk than we ever guessed it
> > would, usually for pretty good reasons. So, we need to find a different way
> > of building up a pipeline, and that's a somewhat unsolved problem as yet. If
> > anyone has ideas, let 'em rip.
>
> > On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 2:21 PM, Ray Ryan <rj...@google.com> wrote:
>
> >> If you're after guarantees I guess that would be 1686, the one that the
> >> 1.7 jar was cut from (gwt-incubator-july-14-2009.jar). Looking at the svn
> >> history, nothing has actually changed in the code from that one to the
> >> removal of StyleInjector. It's all wiki edits and such since then.
>
> >> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 8:46 AM, jay <jay.gin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >>> So...as of right now, what is the *last* version of gwt-incubator that
> >>> is guaranteed to work with GWT 1.7? Is it safe to assume that it is
> >>> the version immediately prior to the removal of StyleInjector?
>
> >>> thanks,
>
> >>> jay
>
> >>> On Sep 10, 8:28 am, Isaac Truett <itru...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> > [oops - +gwtc]
>
> >>> > Hi, Ray,
>
> >>> > I appreciate the drive to move forward and I applaud jumping on
> >>> > opportunities to remove redundant code.
>
> >>> > The reason this policy was important, to me at least, is that it
> >>> > provided a baseline to work against. The code in the incubator can be
> >>> > very useful (I use PagingScrollTable extensively and used DatePicker
> >>> > from incubator before it graduated) but it's also risky because the
> >>> > code is still experimental and subject to change. The assurance that
> >>> > those changes would be compatible with a packaged and released GWT
> >>> > build (even just a milestone) meant that I could build incubator from
> >>> > trunk and pick up the latest features and bugfixes as long as my
> >>> > project tracked the latest GWT build. Because of the GWT policies on
> >>> > deprecation and backwards compatibility, this has been fairly easy in
> >>> > practice. As it stands now, incubator will not compile except against
> >>> > GWT trunk, which is also notoriously unstable (it wasn't building as
> >>> > recently as last night, which I see was corrected this morning). This
> >>> > presents a much higher risk for those of us using incubator code.
>
> >>> > It also becomes harder to work on the incubator itself when it has to
> >>> > compile against GWT trunk. I wanted to look into issue #267 last night
> >>> > and I was stymied by GWT trunk not being in a buildable state. Not an
> >>> > insurmountable obstacle, but one that seems unnecessary to me.
>
> >>> > - Isaac
>
> >>> > On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:03 AM, Ray Ryan <rj...@google.com> wrote:
> >>> > > Hey, Isaac.
> >>> > > That policy has proven very difficult to live with. (And to tell you
> >>> > > the
> >>> > > truth I forgot about it.)
> >>> > > The reasoning here was that we have released incubator jars that work
> >>> > > with
> >>> > > 1.7 and no plans to issue further ones before 2.0 MS1 lands. Should
> >>> > > it prove
> >>> > > necessary to go back and do so we can go back and branch.
> >>> > > In the meantime, we were faced bugs due to FastTree in particular
> >>> > > being tied
> >>> > > to the old StyleInjector while new development was moving to the
> >>> > > version in
> >>> > > GWT.  We saw the opportunity to delete redundant code and took it.
> >>> > > Is this going to cause problems for anyone?
> >>> > > rjrjr
>
> >>> > > On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Isaac Truett <itru...@gmail.com>
> >>> > > wrote:
>
> >>> > >> Last year, Emily stated that it would compile against the "latest
> >>> > >> gwt-milestone and gwt-trunk". There hasn't been a 2.0 milestone that
> >>> > >> I've seen, so under the policy from last year StyleInjector should
> >>> > >> not
> >>> > >> have been removed in revisions 1712-1715.
>
> >>> > >> So, what's the current policy for incubator trunk compatibility?
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to