On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 14:12, Bret Pettichord <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Ethan <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I want to contribute code that will improve the state of Watir overall,
>> that is my only agenda. I believe my changes for the most part do that,
>> except the few things that remain broken, primary among which are popups -
>> that's why I'd be happy to have a well-defined API resolved.
>
>
> You've put some pretty basic changes in your code base, including the
> changing the names of the classes and reorganizing files
>

That is true. There is an entire thread discussing the class names, which
seemed to come to some consensus, to which I intend to change the classes in
my fork. Reorganizing files is quite necessary to unify the codebase across
both browsers, and I intend to improve the organization further.


> that pretty much make it impossible for us to merge in any of your changes
> cleanly, since we're pretty reluctant to make some of the basic changes
> you've made.
>

I keep my fork up to date with the latest watir on github. It is to some
extent true that merging my work is something of an all-or-nothing
proposition due to the extent of changes. I would like to get my fork into a
state that is satisfactory to this community so that the whole thing might
be merged back in.


> If you would like to contribute code to our project, you'll need to go
> about it differently.
>

You like small changes that are easy to look at individually and merge
without disrupting things too much.

I needed a large disruption. I needed a working firewatir, and finding the
existing one quite broken and highly inconsistent with IE watir, I fixed it
to work as a drop-in replacement for IE watir in my project. Upon finding
that most of the changes I made to firewatir would work with IE watir as
well, I moved them to commonwatir and removed code duplicating functionality
across both browsers. It is indeed a major change to watir's internals. On
the user-facing side, though I kept the API very nearly all the same. I
changed some things to my preference along the way where I shouldn't have
without discussion, but have been quite willing to change them back upon
discussing with the community and seeing that my usage was not consistent
with others', or getting ideas I hadn't considered.

This is, as you point out, your project. If do not want the major changes
that are required to unify the disparate, highly inconsistent, and sometimes
broken implementations (particularly in firewatir's case), I will stop
wasting my time trying to satisfy a community that does not want such
changes. If you do, I am very willing to work to consensus on any issues
with my code.

-Ethan
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