On Oct 16, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Marc Guillemot wrote:
Attila Szegedi wrote:
I agree with the sentiment. I quite obviously can't find time to
work on
Rhino for months now. Norris does actually work on it from what I
can tell.
I would love it if we could attract new developers; the thing is
though
that Rhino is a volunteer effort (as most OSS projects are).
Soliciting
volunteers sounds a bit like a contradiction in terms to me. If
someone
is enthusiastic enough to want to be a committer, it is they who
need to
reach the decision and come out with the intent. If I'm soliciting
people to become committers, then where's the volunteer enthusiasm in
it, right?
We need people who understand the Rhino codebase, and know the
ECMA-262
spec. I actually have a favorite candidate for a new committer for at
least the last two years, judged by quality of patches submitted to
Bugzilla. I actually asked him about two years ago already if he
would
like to become a committer, but he politely declined then, citing
how he
has just enough work on his hands (which is a perfectly respectable
and
valid reason; not that anyone needs to actually explain themselves
for
*not* wanting to volunteer for something). I won't cite a name, you
know
who you are, if you changed your mind, I'll still gladly vouch for
you
on your commit access request.
Attila.
Attila,
in other words you agree with the bad situation... but can't / don't
wan't to do anything to change it? ;-(
Just to reiterate from my previous reply - Hannes is joining as a
committer, and my feeling is that I have some involvement in that.
What makes you think I "can't/don't want to do anything"?
Then, to try to change things a little bit, I ask here if you want
me as
new committer. I'm surely more interested in making Rhino working like
most browsers do rather than following strictly ECMA spec, but I think
that both are valuable goals for Rhino and that they are not
incompatible.
I'm not 100% decided one way or the other. I'm leaning toward "yes",
though. You're clearly enthusiastic about Rhino. You have HtmlUnit as
a proof you're a competent software developer. I would feel mostly
okay having you as a Rhino committer. As for "mostly" in the previous
sentence -- there's this discrepancy between us in point of view
regarding Rhino's identity. I don't feel at all that we need to pander
to all the quirks of browser JavaScript runtimes that are notorious
for them. That's more code, which is always more liability, and it
might lead to the code structure being more complicated than it would
otherwise need to be.
On the other hand, people are adding JS 1.7 and 1.8 features already,
so Rhino is definitely not a strict "ECMA-262, 3rd edition" runtime
either.
My only worry is that you sometimes view spec-compliant behaviour as a
bug if it doesn't work as it does in browsers. I believe though that
if you develop a habit of checking the behaviour against the specs
(both ECMA-262 and the reference material on <http://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript
> for newer language additions) before jumping the gun, you should be
an okay addition to the project.
Ultimately, my opinion shouldn't actually be too relevant here at the
moment, as my level of involvement with Rhino is quite low lately, so
I don't believe I should be setting policies for how should Rhino
evolve in the future and who would be adequate person to take it
there. If you join as a committer, and your activity takes Rhino
toward more browser emulating behaviour, I would only have grounds to
object if I were actively developing Rhino now myself, which I am not.
It's Norris who's currently leading the project. It's him and people
at Google around him who are doing most work on Rhino nowadays, and
hopefully Hannes from now on; but in any case not me, so I'd delegate
the decision to them. I.e. Norris might decide that he wants to see
more patches coming from you to gain enough confidence. Based on your
enthusiasm and displayed developer skills, I'd be ready to vouch for
you if you can promise to pay more attention to the specs. You need
two vouching current committers to become a committer.
Attila.
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