Quoting Sam Ruby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> Ovidiu Predescu wrote:
> > 
> > I'm glad this actually didn't happen, since it took a long time for the 
> > 4.0 branch to become stable and usable. If it weren't for the "legacy" 
> > codebase being continually developed, we would have been stuck with a 
> > slow 3.2 and a buggy 4.0. I've used Tomcat 3.3 for more than a year 
> > before switching to 4.1, and I liked 3.3 a lot for its speed and features.
> 
> What would have been more likely to happen is that Tomcat 3.3 would have 
> continued on SourceForge, been known by a different name, had a fully 
> supported servlet 2.3 facade, and would have been known as the 
> production quality servlet engine.

Oh, I think some of my signal was lost in the middle of the conversation. So,
let me get this straighten out.

Here is what I would have liked to see happening in Tomcat:

1) Catalina was voted in.
2) Catalina was renamed Tomcat 4.0 and moved on the main trunk
3) Tomcat 3.x was proposed for internal fork and renamed *whatever* (but not 
tomcat)
4) *whatever* was proposed for Tomcat 5.0 and voted in

In short, that was the way I would have liked Tomcat to route around Craig's
ideas about servlet engine architectures.

Technically, I *HATE* tomcat 4.0, it's an accademic architectural exercise, it's
slow as hell, it is a memory hog, it has mile-long recursive stacktraces, it's
designed for J2EE embedding instead of being designed for a lightweight servlet
plugin for web servers. 

But that is my personal technical opinion and that is a totally different
concern regarding the community dynamics.

I believe it was a mistake to allow two different codebases to share the same
name. And the reason for this is mainly because it would have been very hard for
the 3.x codebase to *revolutionize back* and route around 4.x. 3.x should have 

> > In retrospect, I think the decision to continue the development on both 
> > Tomcat versions was a good one. It let the time solve the frictions. The 
> > result is that now we have a very mature Tomcat community, and little of 
> > the past problems are reflected today on the mailing list.
> 
> +1

But the negative waves of that period are still resonating around the foundation
and I *don't* want to experience that again.

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi                       <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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