This thing has been going on for a bit too long IMHO, and it's a pity that
good code can't find a home.
Anyway, it's time the community decides.

In the latest mail from Sylvain, he has made clear the direction he, and
some other Cocoon committers, would like to see the POI serialization
classes to take.

Andrew C. Oliver has also expressed his opinions clearly, saying why he and
some POI committers would prefer this not to happen.

Here is a brief summary of the whole story:

1. Andrew C. Oliver and Marc Johnson decided to kill time by making classes
in pure Java that could read-write common office file formats.

2. Nicola Ken came in, and among other things, proposed to make the POI
project scope encompass also classes that had been made especially for
Cocoon. The proposal was rejected.

3. The Sourceforge POI community decided, with a vote, to donate the POI
serialization (to XML) classes to Cocoon. This was before being accepted in
Jakarta.

4. The Cocoon committers voted positively for accepting the donation, but
had some reserves on the load this could bring to an already crowded project
like Cocoon.

5. The POI project was accepted in Jakarta, with a proposal that contained
the donation of all xml related classes to Cocoon. These classes have been
in the Sourceforge repository all the time, and could have been seen by all
during the time that separated the POI arrival in Jakarta and the commit of
those classes in Cocoon.

6. Nicola Ken has committed the donation in the Cocoon CVS with samples.

7. Some Cocoon committers have since been uneasy of this code for many
reasons outlined in different mails on the Cocoon dev mailing list. They
propose the POI community to get that code back because it's better for
them, in their opinion.


Basically:

- Some Cocoon committers are not sure it's good to keep the donation,
because they argue that it doesn't fit with what they thought was coming,
despite it has been on Sourceforge for the world to see all this time.

- The POI community has already expressed itself negatively on becoming a
general conversion project for office file formats, and POI doesn't
currently have this functionality in the project scope.

- Users want Cocoon to output with POI and POI to be able to output XML
without Cocoon.


For this I ask the POI developers community to vote on this question:

Do you want to put the xml serialization classes in the POI CVS?
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This vote needs a 3 vote majority to pass, and no -1
http://jakarta.apache.org/site/decisions.html

Being this vote a major change in the POI scope, it will not pass with lazy
approval only.

--
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
            - verba volant, scripta manent -
   (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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