I think my comment is being taken in a way that was not totally intended. The "lazy" refers to the ability/desire of the 1.4 "users & developers" to devote their resources to back-porting the code to the 2.0.X release. Rather than having the 1.5 developers having to waste their time "thinking" in 1.4 when their work is predominately being performed using 1.5 features/compilers/tools. There is NOTHING stopping the 1.4 community from doing this, except their "laziness" in wanting to (especially given their common assessment that 1.5 is nothing more than syntactic sugar).
The "ill-informed " refers to the 1.4 community's inability to grasp that they can continue to use the 2.0.X code base, and their lack of understanding that for the code base to continue to improve, Lucene needs access to the best developers and those with the most time to offer - not make them jump through hoops by using a JDK that is being close to 2 major releases old. Maybe "selfish" would have been a better choice. The argument of not being able to move to 1.5 seems to hold little water. If the users can't upgrade their OS, or hardware, etc. then they are most likely in a fairly stagnant state anyway - why would they want to keep updating their software? It is easily conceivable that given inexpensive RAM, abundant disk space, and/or CPU performance that a future version of Lucene might use completely different persistence scheme (e.g. no compression, load the tables completely into memory, etc.) that "older" machines cannot possibly work with. Should Lucene be left behind because there are some users that can't operate in that environment? NO. Let them stick with what has been working for them, and let Lucene move forward. You make reference to the apache libraries. I know that if I had to work on a "actively developed" code set that used the apache commons collections - rather than the JDK Collections - I'd go nuts - and I'm sure many (most?) developers would feel the same. Why the 1.4 Lucene community fails to understand this I don't know. -----Original Message----- From: DM Smith [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 19, 2006 10:47 PM To: java-dev@lucene.apache.org Subject: Re: Results (Re: Survey: Lucene and Java 1.4 vs. 1.5) Just got back from a long weekend vacation without any net access. Talk about withdrawal:) I have just gotten through reading this entire thread... Whew. On Jun 19, 2006, at 8:48 PM, Robert Engels wrote: > > > People making these arguments against 1.5 sound really ill- informed, > or lazy. Neither of which is good for open-source development. > Ouch. I'm not sure which I am: Is it ill-informed or lazy? I lurk here to see what is being developed and am impressed with the care and the thoughtfulness that goes into the code. I'm probably better served by joining the user's mailing list, but I find this more educational. So, my comment is that of a user. I'll repeat myself. I am a contributor to the open source project, BibleDesktop, which allows a user to search Bibles using boolean logic. We have settled on Java 1.4 because all of our user community has Java 1.4 available. Our user community consists of people and groups that use hand me down hardware, that was past due when they got it. Most of these users are not computer literate, but use their computer as a tool to do their work. So even if their hardware could be upgraded to a newer OS, it it not likely. (The vast majority of our user base uses Windows 98, but a few use MacOS 9!) When will we stop supporting Win98 and MacOS 9? When our users no longer use it. (No a lone hold out won't stop progress... And yes Win98 runs Java 1.5 just fine! But if it weren't for those reliable Mac machines, we might not have to stay with Java 1.4!) We use quite a few apache and jakarta libraries and we upgrade to the latest and greatest as soon as we can. So far, there have been no Java 5.0 libraries and the new libraries have not provided any stability/performance problems. Can I stick with 2.0.x? Certainly. However, I'd rather not. I keep reading about refactoring providing a significant, incremental improvement, and I'd like to provide that, especially for those older machines! Can Lucene's going to Java 1.5 change/influence a migration of BibleDesktop to Java 1.5. Nope. The only thing that can influence that is "business decisions" So, which is it: Ill-informed or lazy? --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
