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.
Preface - I'm not a lucene developer - just an interested user.
I don't know - it seems to me that it is the 1.5 crowd that is making
the lazy argument. You are in effect, saying, that the highly skilled
developers who would be making lucene contributions are unable or
unwilling to write 1.4 java code? Come on... it really not that hard.
Which set is being lazy? I'll stop the name calling now, and try to
make a better point.
I have some applications that I have written in 1.5 - and yes - it is
nice. But I also have other applications (that use Lucene) that are
written to be 1.4 compatible. And they need to stay that way for quite
some time to come. Why? Many reasons. The first - because they
implement an official HL7 specification - and the specification says
that the implementation needs to support Java 1.4.
Also, at my place of employment we have about 40,000 desktop computers
that are all centrally managed - down to every point release of every
single piece of software. There are multiple applications using java
that are installed on these machines. Each application has to be
certified and fully tested with a newer version of java before a newer
version of java can be installed. As you can imagine, that severely
hampers the pace of java updates. We are just getting 1.4 installed on
these machines now. When you are managing that many machines in a
clinical environment - you have to play it safe. There are no upgrades
for an upgrades sake, or for syntactic sugar. There has to be a real
problem to even get the process started. I'm sure many other people
have similar situations.
Also - I don't know much about the Java mobile platform - but I thought
I had read before that they are limited to the 1.3 or 1.4 feature set?
If this is true, do we really want to remove an entire ecosystem of
potential users? Over syntactic sugar?
While I'm not completely opposed to the argument that I should just have
to stay with the Lucene 2.0.x release with applications that need to run
in 1.4 environments - Lucene is an integral part of that code. If
performance improvements are made to the core, I want those in my code.
If bugs are found and fixed - I want those fixes too. As a matter of
fact - until the 2.0 release, I was using a build from the trunk because
of a bug that I found in Lucene, (and someone else was gracious enough
to fix for me). Lucene is a low level library that is used to build
many great applications. If you make the jump to 1.5 today - you are
going to be leaving people behind. And judging by the poll, you are
going to be leaving a fairly significant number of people behind.
Lucene has great policy on not breaking backwards compatibility in their
API - why should this be looked at any differently?
> 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.
I don't think that the caliber of developers that are working on the
Lucene core are going to be slowed down any by using 1.4 syntax over
1.5. (It actually takes longer to type in all of those generics :) All
of my tools - Eclipse and Java 1.5 - have a check box that will cause
them to generate 1.4 compatible code. Its really _not_ a big deal to
write 1.4 code even if you are used to 1.5. This particular argument
just isn't compelling to me.
My personal opinion for the path that Lucene should take:
Core bugs fixes must be 1.4 compatible.
Core improvements must be 1.4 compatible.
Contrib / sandbox can be 1.5 or 1.6.
Of course, at some point - Lucene Core does need to advance. But I
don't just don't feel that syntactic sugar in 1.5 is enough of a reason
to break backwards compatibility. I haven't followed 1.6 - I don't know
what the new features are there. Assuming that there are great new
features in 1.6 - that would improve the lucene core if they were used -
I think that that is when this issue gets revisited.
This isn't the type of question that should be decided by a poll. This
should be decided by thoughtfully looking at the consequences of each
choice. For me - the negative consequences of choosing 1.5 - leaving
behind a lot of users - is much worse than the negative consequences of
staying at 1.4 - making a couple dozen highly skilled developers check
an extra box in their lucene development environments?
If any developers have actually read this far (sorry - it got kind of
long) - thanks again for all of your great work - Lucene is a great tool
- and a great community.
Dan
--
****************************
Daniel Armbrust
Biomedical Informatics
Mayo Clinic Rochester
daniel.armbrust(at)mayo.edu
http://informatics.mayo.edu/
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