Excellent ideas!
+1 submit a patch
Also you can update the wiki imedately. Actually, feel free to make "big" changes the the xdocs. There is no one maintaining them, so if you have the motivation and time, I'm sure no one will object. Heck I've been wanting to move our site away from a maven auto-generated site for a long time, but I simply don't have the time.
-dain
-- Dain Sundstrom Chief Architect Gluecode Software 310.536.8355, ext. 26
On Feb 9, 2005, at 9:04 AM, toby cabot wrote:
Bruce, Geronimo Team,
"What we've got here, is a failure to communicate."
There's a difference between "progress" and "the appearance of progess" and both are important. There's a *lot* of progress happening, and you guys are justifiably proud of that progress, but the message that you're getting here is that it's harder than it should be for "outsiders" to figure that out.
It's probably hard for people to really understand this if they're too close to the project, but as a gedankenexperiment try pretending that you're some random guy that's heard about Geronimo and wants to find out more about it. So you go to geronimo.apache.org, maybe look at the releases on the front page, maybe click on the "news" link, and for 99.99% of the people that's it, they're gone. I think you'll agree that from that perspective the *appearance* of progress is way out of line with the *actual* progress. I think that will probably push a lot of people away. If nothing else, it's troll food.
So in the spirit of constructive criticism I'll offer a few suggestions that I hope will make the *appearance* of progress more closely reflect the *actual* progress:
1. The code in the svn repo is light years more functional than the code on the front page of the website, and releases are disruptive and time-consuming (and thus infrequent), so maybe someone can add a note to the "Downloads" section of the home page, something like:
Geronimo development is moving quickly, so we recommend that you get
a copy of the source code and build it, rather than use any binary release
that's more than a month old. By building from source you'll get
the latest functionality and you'll also be one step closer to being
able to contribute to Geronimo. Instructions for building Geronimo
can be found on the Geronimo wiki at
http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/Building.
2. From mailing list traffic I've seen it looks as if the source releases are broken (at least the tarballs), and they're definitely obsolete and unmaintained, so why not just get rid of them entirely? People who are interested in the code would be *much* better served by getting it from source control.
3. A couple of people mentioned that a lot of work is going on behind the scenes that can't be publicised because of agreements with Sun, etc etc. So why not add a note to the News page indicating that? Something like:
The Geronimo Development Team is now working on J2EE certification. Because of our agreements with Sun we're not allowed say anything specific about our status, but we're working hard and making progress!
4. There *is* a lot more news about Geronimo than is on the news page. Didn't EJBQL just land the other day? That's significant! Maybe moving news to the wiki would make it easier for folks to add items that they think are important. Hell, if nobody's got the time to add items to the news page maybe the link on the home page should point to http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/RecentChanges . That page isn't all that easy to read but at least it's got lots of recent changes to it.
I believe that a small amount of time spent bringing appearances in line with reality would be well spent in terms of saving time by not having discussions like this one. It might even attract more people to Geronimo, at least it won't turn them away. If folks agree with the gist of these ideas I can submit a patch to the web site.
Regards, Toby
