Jeremias Maerki wrote: > I don't want to be too negative, but I've thought a little about > Sanselan. What happens if someone comes up with a 100% Java JPEG or > JBIG2 implementation? Or ImageIO codecs wrapping the implementations > here? Sanselan is a collection of related items. When one item is > finished there's not much incentive to stick around and do further > development. Once you got the feature you were looking for, you're gone. > > All we have is a few wishes, but not enough time to make certain > things happen. > > Philipp is basically hinting at part of the problem: "ok, jpeg is > missing but can be worked around easily." ImageIO offers so much that > you only need Sanselan in very special cases. JPEG support is not as > badly needed as it is available on every Java VM >=1.4. You (maybe) extract > the metadata with Sanselan but load the image with ImageIO. > > ATM, I have trouble seeing how a community can be built like this. Of > course, a small group can allocate some time to work on a few things and > get the project through graduation, but isn't it then only destined for > the Attic afterwards? Please don't get me wrong: Sanselan is a great > library and offers some very nice functionality. At the moment, I just > don't see it graduating any time soon. The best I currently see for > Sanselan is to become an Apache Commons subproject that is allowed to go > dormant for some time and to be reawakened from time to time to add some > functionality. However, I fear that Sanselan would get lost in the noise > of the joint mailing lists. But Sanselan as a TLP? I have trouble > imagining that. For the third time in a row, we basically report almost > the exact same text. > > I'm curious about your ideas. I'd like Sanselan to succeed. > Ok, so here we go: I think basically we have three options (I'm just listing all of them, I'm not a fan of all of them!):
1) continue in the same manner and hope that at some point of time the community will grow and we can graduate - but I fear this won't happen. Sanselan is a cool and great library which is perfect for the things it does. It's easy to use it and it works. Which is of course great for a software but bad for community building :) 2) close down the project and call it "failed incubation" - now this would be a really bad and in the end it wouldn't help anyone. Code like this are a great benefit to the foundation. 3) try to graduate :) Now, obviously we can't make it into an own TLP, so we need to become a sub project of an existing TLP. I thought about Tikka (well, Lucene in this case) and Apache Commons. I mentioned Commons to Craig and he thought that this would be a good option (I hope I got this right Craig) and you're also coming to this conclusion. Apache Commons is imho a perfect fit for software like this; it's a focused domain, with working/perfect code and it might just need some maintenance from time to time; I guess most of these criterias are true for several projects in commons. Maybe there is a fourth option? But I think we should talk with the Commons people and see what they think about it. I think we met all graduation criteria apart from the diversity/community aspect. So we're ready to graduate into a sub project like commons. WDYT? Carsten -- Carsten Ziegeler [email protected]
