Peter Donald wrote:
Hi,That history is fairly accurate. It is important to note that there was also a lot more discussion
I had hoped that it would not get to this point but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case. However it looks like the best thing for all parties involved is to break up Avalon into different projects. One of the first things I am going to propose is the graduation of Phoenix and related infrastructure to a new top level project.
Below is the outline of my reasoning why I believe this to be in the best interests of Avalon. Over the next few weeks I plan to put together a "vision" document and proposal - if anyone else wants to help (or do it) then they are welcome to take over ;)
It may be best to start from the start. I initially started observing avalon when it was pretty dead. Nothing was happening so I went away. Then all of a sudden this Berin guy started doing stuff and then there was life. Fede and Stefano also came back and together they kicked the tires and started the fires.
I was building another component based server framework at the time and thus I used this as an opportunity to bounce ideas off Berin. At the time what I was writing was much more monolithic, lower abstractions and used a lot more off the shelf components (w3c DOM/JDOM, JNDI, Properties etc). I eventually managed to refactor into something nicer - more in the way Avalon was going.
A month or so later I came on board and stuff progressed. We started to break apart the monolithic avalon project into bite sized chunks that more accurately modelled the units in which they were used. We also became able to actually release parts that were at different maturity levels. It was still "big ball of mud" style programming but we were moving forward.
We regularly rewrote the whole codebase - as many as three times in one particular month. Along with that was the flamefests - far more excited than has been seen in Avalon for a long time. However they were of a far nicer variety than what is now present in Avalon - at least then we were all interested in promoting Avalon as a whole and there was mutual respect between developers. Even when we were competing for our ideas we went out of our way to help other - I even recall Berin helping out with JDOM stuff which he wasn't too fond of ;) Some of the code was not too hot but the level of collaboration and cooperation was great.
*before* things got committed to CVS. The recent mindshare battles fought in CVS is very bad
all the way around.
Fast forward to now. Most of the problems arise from committers who were added into Avalon before they had demonstrated any capability or desire to cooperate with the existing committers (and some to this day have not committed a line of code). As a result there is whole codebases that are one man jobs - a nomans land which other committers avoid like the plague.Many of the problems are social in nature. The TLP will help provide a mechanism to resolve these
It also seems that we have aquired that condition of "try to block competition via politics" which previously we had avoided. On a few occasions Stephen has tried to block improvements in Phoenix because it competed with his pet container.
And thats not to mention the personal attacks that have recently become a distinguishing quality on the avalon lists. Add that to the behaviour regarding code ownership and it just gets messy.
So things are changing - right? Appologies have been made and Avalon may become a TLP - which will supposedly "fix" the problems that have occured in the past.
issues. I fear though that the PMC can be abused just as well as it can be used.
Rather than seeking consensus for major decisions (like becoming a TLP) we have seen Stephen try to push through his own ideas - even when it was obvious that a large proportion of active developers chose not to engage the proposal, it was still sent along to the board.
I don't like the quick timeframe at all.
Also discussion about the way the "new" avalon will operate disturbs me. It has been implied that the PMC will be making development decisions to solve some of the problems.
I have a lot to catch up on. What "new" avalon are we talking about?
Putting all these things together it becomes obvious that Phoenix is hurt by staying in Avalon. The users are hurt because they are subject to trolling and the developers are hurt because they constantly have to work around other people who don't participate in the development but can still cause harm.If it would be better for Phoenix to become its own TLP, then I will support it. However, I would be
So the solution? The solution would be moving phoenix development out of avalon into a product-centric project focused on Phoenix and supporting infrastructure.
reluctant to support it if the cheif issue is social. If there is real technical benefit to the Phoenix TLP,
then +1.
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