On 8/25/06, Patrick Lightbody <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Goal: It should be our goal to ship Struts in a way that it is pre-configured with default settings that mimic the agreed upon styles and techniques by the very
best Struts users
and developers.
Hmmm, how do we determine who are the "very best" developers. I meet a lot of excellent developers in the field. I'm sure some of them are better Struts developers than I am. In fact, they are so busy being excellent Struts developers, they don't have time for this sort of thing :) Personally, I wouldn't characterize the PMC as the "leaders" or the "best of breed". The PMC is simply a group of individuals who are willing to contribute to the project and share a common set of values regarding collaboration. We are willing to work together to create and maintain the framework that we want to use to build our own applications.
But if, say, Ted or Don or Patrick doesn't agree, we need to really dig in to the heart of the issue. Because odds are that what is happening is that two very different styles of development are happening by different team members, and therefore the product isn't being optimized due to competing interests.
A PMC with diverse interests is the core strength of an ASF project. Even if the indivduals on the PMC were to agree on a large set of best practices, that doesn't mean we will get to use all of those practices at our day jobs. Ideally, we will be among the developers that need to change some of the defaults to meet the needs of our own projects. We are all working developers, and we eat our own dog food.
This is critically important. Suppose we ship struts with all sorts of options turned off by default, but the core set of developers turn those options off in all
our apps. What will
happen is that the user base, who generally will not change the
defaults, will use Struts
under different constraints than the developers. A disconnected will
form, and the users
will push for changes that the developers will not understand or see
in their daily
development.
But, we are the user base too. In practice, a PMC is a working focus group. Hopefully, we will attract developers from a wide variety of projects, so that the framework we build will be robust enough to fill all our varied needs. Personally, I think it's a good thing that Patrick writes applications one way and that Jason writes them a different way. The differences are our strength. The differences are what make the framework worth the time and effort it takes to build it. -Ted. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
