On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 04:50:28PM +0100, Mark Wielaard wrote: > In a way all these existing projects (classpath, kaffe, gcj, cacao, > jamvm, ikvm, sablevm, etc) are just forks of each other (or mergers of > other projects). And they do even compete! But when you have enough > dedicated enthusiastic people and technical direction around a project > forks and re-merges are just part of the development process. We are > constantly seeing new forks popup and then later merge stuff back in. A > healthy diverse ecosystem is the best cure for fork-angst.
You know, at apache, usually we don't see all that many forks at all. Most of our projects tend to have just a single (sometimes two) trunks rolling forward. We don't see a lot of microforks at all. There's lots of discussion about this stuff on the web recently (again), painted as the centralized vs the decentralized model: http://www.google.com/search?q=centralized%20decentralized%20version%20control for example at: http://blog.red-bean.com/sussman/?p=20 What apache does have a lot is multiple competing implementations of the same thing (eg 10 web app frameworks, 2 logging implementations, 3 logging abstractions, ...), and then we have some projects that aggregate those things and you can swap them in and out (Re: struts, cocoon). (Oh, and then everyone still wants to use hibernate :-)). I'm really interested in what's going to happen at/with harmony in this respect. LSD
