Henri Yandell wrote:
On 3/22/06, Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Henri Yandell wrote:
foo.apache.org maps to a PMC, which maps to a coding community, not to
a codebase.
Henri, I feel I should give you a bit of end-user feedback. I am not
active in any apache.org projects, but, obviously, it happens quite
frequently that I go visit the front page of a given apache.org project,
to check it out for whatever needs I have at that moment.
ยด
FYI, when I visit foo.apache.org, I am not there for the PMC or whatever
ASF bureaucratic construct. I'm there for the code.
In general, when I visit the front page of a project, I like to be able
to figure out what the thing is fairly quickly. This is definitely a
problem with Struts currently.
So that's a website issue ie) how to join/find the community rather
than an issue in how the community itself is structured.
Do you have suggestions to improve the Struts website so that things
are more clear? There's not a website at the ASF that couldn't be made
a bit clearer.
Well, just go to http://struts.apache.org/ and look at it and imagine
that you don't know anything about what struts is. I put it to you that
the reader who hits your front page should not be supposed to know what
the thing is.
What is strange about it is that whoever wrote the page tacitly
recognizes that it is a confused jumble and spends most of the page
trying to rationalize it. "Why two frameworks?" followed by "Why so many
subprojects?" What is also patently obvious is that the two rhetorical
questions are posed on the page, and never, AFAICS, answered satisfactorily.
And then the text there just assumes all kinds of insider knowledge that
the reader of the front page really IMHO should not be assumed to know.
Now, you can go look at the page, Henri, and maybe you think it's okay.
If you do think the whole thing is really A-OK, then we have a
difference of opinion. Here is the basis of it:
Who is the intended audience for this text?
I guess we have different answers for that.
(I could almost characterize it as that the author's intended audience
in "Why two frameworks?" and so on is himself!)
I don't think this is a problem of website organization. The website
problem _reflects_ a deeper problem.
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
So:
If Shale, Struts 1.x and Struts 2.x are being developed by the same
community -
Nah, my understanding is that this isn't really the case. There is a
Struts 1.x which is basically in maintenance mode. There is a Struts
Action Framework 2.x which is basically Webwork (until recently a
completely separate *competing* product developed outside of ASF) and
that's a completely separate team at the moment.
Right, so two communities merging. This is all good - it's probably
natural that you'll see the old hands maintaining the 1.2/1.3 releases
instead of the Webwork guys, but who knows. Plus there will be new
committers, maybe some who just focus on 1.3 because the community
wants to keep it alive.
And Shale is something
with a completely different approach, and I assume, has a separate team.
Team-wise, everybody in Struts has access to all the code. They're
also using the same mailing list, and are components in the same
Bugzilla project. All great ways to keep the community together.
Looking at viewcvs quickly; I immediately see overlap. People
committing to shale who are committing to action-1; and the same for
action-2. There will definitely be a focus for each person - but it's
easy to see cross-pollination at work.
Struts is a cool community. The users are actively involved, in terms
of answering and asking; people obviously care about the community -
as shown by both your and Dakota's questions and by the desire of the
committers to work to keep things together; and there's an active
future happening plus legacy being actively maintained by both
contributors and committers.
Yes, shale and action might move apart as the months/years go by and
at some point they might want to separate, but right now it doesn't
look like an unhealthy situation to me. These things tend to evolve
quite happily - someone like yourself raises a question of whether
it's time to make an evolutionary leap, and the community responds. In
the case of this thread I think it's not time for the leap.
Hen
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