Will Glass-Husain wrote:
Please post such questions to the velocity-user list, thanks, rather
than private emails to the committers.
Yes, Velocity is actively maintained. There's also a strong user
community. See the web site, mailing list, and Wiki for more details.
Will,
As I said in my earlier response to Henning Schmiedehausen on this
topic, I am actually reluctant to use the inflammatory L word. Moreover,
in this case, what you are saying is not, I guess, absolutely untruthful
by the most stringent tests. Nonetheless, your response to this man (and
why on earth you write it in public rather than answering him privately
I do not know) lies in the gray area between lies and truth. One cannot
help but infer some kind of lawyerish intent to deceive without crossing
the line of telling an outright lie -- a wish to conceal the full truth
of the matter.
As somebody who keeps an eye on the Velocity project, it is evident to
me that the project is, at best, emerging from a period of prolonged
neglect. For example, in a recent post, you mentioned the hash literal
feature. I definitely recall that a patch for this was offered by some
guy at least 2 or 3 years ago. AFAIK, the patch works and there aren't
many ways to do hash literals. The python syntax that FreeMarker
adopted, for {"foo" : bar, "baz" : foobar} seems about right. What
justification is there for some guy offering a patch 2 or probably 3
years ago, and the matter still being unresolved?
The decimal number thing is a much more important case in point, where a
patch was offered by a guy IIRC in late 2002 and it literally took
several years to resolve the issue. Or the persistent chronic issues
regarding the parsing of whitespace in templates. This issue comes up
again and again, and there is AFAICS zero forward progress towards
addressing these issues. There are various other issues that seem to be
reported regularly with no perceptible effort to remedy them. Nor does
there seem to be any roadmap whatsoever for further development of Velocity.
Well, in any case, the neglected state of the Velocity project is not a
matter of legitimate debate. As of Webwork 2.2, FreeMarker is the
default template engine in Webwork, and if you look at their lists, you
will see plenty of references to Velocity being unmaintained and
neglected. Would you seriously suggest that these comments are a product
of their collective imagination?
It is reasonable, given this history of neglect, that a rational person
would seek reassurances before depending on it in his or her
professional work. In my view, a 100% truthful response to this person's
query would have to be basically that the project is attempting to
emerge from a prolonged state of neglect. This remains, at the moment,
primarily a one-man effort on your part though there are other people
now expressing an interest in contributing. In your spot, I would have
added that you are, naturally, quite interested in getting more people
involved to help out. Such, IMO, would be a truthful, good-faithed answer.
Already, people will tend to assume that a project hosted on apache.org
is actively maintained and developed because they are making
associations with the Apache web server. Now, the fact remains that the
Apache server, written in C, has no more connection with Velocity than,
say, FreeMarker does. It's completely orthogonal. But people will make
that association, so you're starting with a strong marketing advantage.
Well, such is life, and I'm not complaining about that really. But I do
not believe that people have any business misrepresenting the state of
this project (or any other). It is simply unethical. I have already
anticipated the flames and insults to my person that may arise from my
writing this note, but on reflection, I am satisfied that it is utterly
proper that I should make these points if nobody else will.
As a final point, if anybody wants to write a rebuttal to my points
above, they are quite welcome. But they really should restrict
themselves to addressing my points rather than engaging in any personal
attacks. (There is also an established history here of people engaging
in personal attacks when they cannot respond to legitimate debating points.)
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
WILL
----- Original Message ----- From: "Zeljko Markovic"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <dlr@finemaltcoding.com>
Sent: Saturday, September 24, 2005 11:18 PM
Subject: Velocity maintained?
Is velocity maintained and still developed?
The version 1.4 has not been updated for a very long time.
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