> I don't agree. TC3.3 is a rewrite of TC3.2, with all
> of the TC4 "fancy features" (and some more).
3.3 is not a "rewrite" of 3.2 - some code was moved
for better organization and modularity, and we
finished a number of optimizations that were started
during 3.2 development.
Yes, a lot of code was rewriten ( cookies is a good
example ) - but that's just a normal evolution of 3.2
-
and the same happened after 3.1.
Regarding the "fancy features" - 3.3 allows people to
add any feature as a module, but the "core" is much
simpler and feature-free than 3.2 ( or 4.0 ). In fact
one of the goals of 3.3 refactoring was to make sure
that all the "features" are modules ( examples: error
handling, class loader hierarchy, jsp integration,
servlet facade, etc )
> AFAIK, there is no plan to get rid of / stop
> maitaining TC 3.2, and actually
> it's Craig who handles the 3.2 releases and
> maintenance releases (like
> 3.2.1), not Costin.
Well, I must agree that this is a nice "political"
spin. It seems suddenly the evolution of 3.2 to 3.3 (
identical with the evolution of 3.1 to 3.2 BTW) turns
to be a "rewrite" or "fork" or "revolution". And 3.2.1
becomes the "evolution path" of 3.2. It also seems
that improvements on 3.3 are "bad" because they take
away resources from 4.0, and features that are ok to
4.0 are "featurism" if implemented as tomcat3.3
modules.
I'm very happy to see Craig doing maintenance releases
of 3.2 until 3.3 is ready ( and I hope that will
happen in few months ). Please don't tell me that
Craig is going to do major performance improvments in
3.2.2, or rewrite the cookie handling ( to corectly
implement the specs), etc - so far it seems that he's
( rightly ) integrating bug fixes - that's what should
happen on any maintainance release. ( and of course,
he keeps forgeting the rules about release branches -
that a patch in the release branch should be merged
into the development branch )
It's a huge difference between maintaining a release
and continuing ( and finishing ) development. Tomcat
3.2 is much better than 3.1 because of active
development, and 3.3 will be better than 3.2.x because
of the same reason - things that can't be done in
3.2.x ( and it doesn't seem to happen anyway )
As I said earlier, the reason we need 3.3 is that 3.2
has unfinished areas - the core refactoring started
after 3.1 is the most important, performance is
another ( and that's easy to check by comparing 3.3
with 3.2 as performance or by reading the core package
).
Because of the available resources we choosed not to
do maintainance releases of 3.1 unless a major
bug/security issue is found, but try to have a major
release (3.2) in a reasonable time. I think the same
should happen with 3.3, and I'm working as hard as
possible ( given the little free time I have ) to
finish 3.3 development in a short time ( again - few
months ).
BTW, if I remember corectly the rules for tomcat
developlment, after a feature freeze leading to a
release, "development continues into the main branch,
with only bug fixes going into the release branch".
That's what I'm doing - continuing the development of
tomcat3 into the main branch. The bug fixes that go
into the release branch are great, but please stop
spining that into something else.
Costin
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