On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 09:44 -0500, Henri Yandell wrote:
> Specifically with respect to Latka, but applicable to all Commons components.
> 
> How do we want to handle released (ie non-sandboxed) components that
> have gone dormant? Do we add a new component called Legacy (or
> something like that)?
> 
> So:
> 
> Released
> Legacy
> Unreleased
> Dormant
> 
> Currently we have 6 months as the time to drop out of the unreleased
> (sandbox) section and into the dormant section. How long would we want
> to be looking at to start a vote to drop things from Released into
> Legacy? 1 year? 2 years?

i'm not sure that legacy is really the right word here. legacy implies
that there it's not supported whereas the case may be that a component
is just finished. it should be expected that the quantity of coding on
the components we have here should gradually move towards zero: in the
end, bugs get fixed and code factored out into newer more specialist
components. 

a good example would be collections. this is a great library but active
development is now approaching zero. labelling collections as legacy
would mislead users into thinking that they should not use this library
whereas the message should be that this library is so well tested and
widely used that bugs are very few and so feature-filled that worthy
extensions are now rare. 

i'm also worried that we're failing to distinguish between different
states: libraries (if they are sufficiently popular) will evolve to a
stage whereby development slows since they are just about finished. IMHO
lumping these together with libraries which are not finished but which
no longer have an active development community will just confuse
developers and users.

- robert


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