Phil Steitz wrote:
I agree with your assessment of that platform; but your comment raises an interesting question: to what extent should commons component design decisions be influenced by characteristics of the user base. My opinion is "lots." "Lame and broken" as it may be, WebLogic 5 on NT has a large installed base => lots of potential commons users. Similarly, WebSphere 3 (JDK - sic - 1.2.2) and WebSphere 4 (JDK 1.3.1) are huge. Most of these folks have do not have the luxury of choosing their deployment targets and they often have limited control over their deployment environments. I think that it is very reasonable to try to make things as easy as possible for them.
I also agree with Danny's observation above that for commons-math in particular, the commitment in the proposal was to keep dependencies to a minimum.
Phil
Certainly not arguing about decisions influenced by characteristics of the user base. We definitly want this. And I think expecially in the consideration of JVM versions and capabilities, But, you know, wow what a murky and subjective domain when you get into web-platforms.
And to be a bit more philisophical, Literally, by maintaining for an older platform, you promote continued usage of that platform, which contributes to more issues you need to balance out across versions of platforms. Eventually there needs to be a line drawn
I really hope we don't think the command line limitations of the Windows platform should be an issue in deciding how many "jars" we're going to make the math project dependent on. lol 8-)
-M.
p.s. Yes, I'm the one eating my words by dragging this subject on even further now after I said to get back to the matter of dependencies in math specifically ;-)
-- Mark Diggory Software Developer Harvard MIT Data Center http://osprey.hmdc.harvard.edu
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