Re: FOM blocking 2.1 release

[Christopher Oliver]

First of all I'm not advocating a design methodology. Second, I like 
your's and Ricardo's design. And I think we should implement it. Beyond 
that I have nothing to say, specifically about supposed design 
methodology or regarding what should be included in the 2.1 release. I 
retract my earlier statements about both.

Regards,

Chris

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

on 6/15/03 3:53 PM Christopher Oliver wrote:

 

Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:

   

Ovidiu wrote the FOM with "let's cover everything" mindset. He restated
the fact that he likes this approach better on his last mail to this list.
The problem I have with this approach is that *NO* part of Cocoon has
been designed like this, but rather with more XP-like approaches of
"start small and grow with needs, questioning them everytime".
     

Sorry, I don't agree with your characterization of Ovidiu's approach. 
Anyway, I guess you're welcome do what you like, but I for one would 
like to see more _actual_ use of the current flowscript implementation 
before jumping to the conclusion that a new design is going to make a 
significant difference.
   

Cocoon has been designed with incremental darwinistic design. Which
means: add a feature *ONLY* if absolutely necessary and backed up with
*real* use-case scenarios which cannot be done elegantly in any other way.
You say that we need more _actual_ use of the flowscript to understand
what are the best practices: I CANNOT AGREE MORE!
But my approach at design is orthogonal to yours and Ovidiu's: you give
full access and expect to deprecate things that are harmful, I give
access only to those things that are needed today and plan to add things
at user request, provided a community discussion and a real-life reason
for it.
So, more than redesigning the FOM (and stepping on people's egos in
doing so), what I want to change is the "design approach" to the FOM
which is what really concerns me.
Ricardo and I identified in our proposal a *MINIMAL* set of methods that
make up the FOM. Minimal means that we could not remove anything without
considering a meaningful case where we would need it.
Will it be complete? of course not, we expect it to be in need for being
extended. But extending a contract is never a problem, reducing it is,
and big time so.
But I'm starting to realize that this moves sounds like a "coup d'etat"
and I don't want to make it look like so.
So I'll start a vote on this to see how the community feels about it
because last thing I want to do is to make it look like this is a
personal crusade.