I posted a "feeler" question to the PMC group today just to get some initial feedback. Considering the support from all parties, and the concerns that I personally have, I would now like to get a bigger picture of the whole Avalon developers group.
I have a feeling that Avalon, and specifically Merlin is focusing too much on the enterprise. I know that the enterprise features are necessary for some folks, but others simply do not need it. It never really had simplicity, and to be honest I can't tell what it does and does not do. I know of a couple of people who are concerned (and will remain nameless until they choose not to be).
To be honest, I am not in a situation where I need enterprise level architecture anymore. I just need something simple. The current Fortress does fit my needs, and I am almost scared to try Merlin. To be fair, I should declare what I mean by simple. By simple, I mean that I have a set of components I need, but I don't need security, proxying, etc. Granted, I do need to extend the lifecycle, but that is another topic entirely.
I am not really for a cease and desist type of action, but I really want to know if my needs are truly that distinct from where Avalon is going. For a long time we have talked about something that would be easy to modify or easy to extend. Many of us can prove that it can be done--but noone is interested in a complete rebuild or new work. I don't blame them. I feel the need for simplicity is being drowned out by the need for features.
Another thing that scares me is the rate of mutation for Merlin. You may know what it does this week, but come back to it a couple weeks later and everything is different. There are hundreds of commit messages that go by all the time, and it is difficult for me to try to keep up with what is really going on.
The questions I have are this (for those who have not seen this earlier):
1) Am I alone in my concerns?
2) If not, how should we start refactoring Merlin to make it what we all need?
* please note that development should be able to continue while refactoring
occurs.3) What about the guy with simple needs? What are we going to do for him?
4) What about extensibility? We need this if we are to survive. Right now I get the feeling that Merlin is an all or nothing approach. Not a pick and choose the feature set approach.
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