> From: Stephen McConnell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > while Leo is jumping in and doing something about the build - will > Leo or anyone else be interested and committed to maintaining these > things?
Well, you have one person willing to get them compilable. (Me.) It's not much, but hey, it is a start. (I think this is an irrelevant question, see below.) > One way of eliminating this problem is to look at the packages in > question and address the bigger question concerning > synchronization with Avalon's direction. Yes, but here you are starting a much bigger question that will take the major part of forever to resolve. What is Avalon's direction? Really, have we reached consensus on it? One could make an argument that before *anything* goes into CVS - and that includes any development of Merlin - we must have reached agreement on the direction of Avalon. But that would be impractical, so we don't have such a requirement. Because... *Any* action, be it a spell check or massively new features occur in the context of some greater question - should I fix this spell check in the Javadocs for this class, or should take one step back, refactor and just remove the class altogether? Should I sacrifice backwards compatibility here or allow for pluggability? What effects will this architectural decision have on the common component model? Should this feature even go into Avalon? And on and on and on... Worse, that greater question is in turn just a part of something even greater - does backwards compat make sense here in the context of the roadmap (what roadmap, based on what consensus?)? However, if we try to solve the big questions, we'll *never* get *anywhere*. Sometimes, you just have to *make a decision*, one way or the other, because... ...there's not enough knowledge to tackle the bigger question. ...there's no time to tackle the bigger question. We can debate the existence of these packages in the avalon repo endlessly, and we can debate the bigger question of continued existence of Avalon as well - why should we exist as a TLP in Apache? Then we can go on to discuss the meaning of life and whether our precious time on Earth is best spent writing long rambling letters to a mailing list. The alternative is to just acknowledge that there is a need to get a release out, because these packages are used and needed, and just *get on with it*. I have a vague memory of a story about a philosopher that starved to death even though he had plenty of food in front of him, because he kept analyzing his actions. "Shall I eat? Must first solve the question of mind/body duality... but then I must solve the question of whether the food in front of me is real, and not just an illusion..." Sometimes you just have to skip the bigger question. Like Carsten asked, would you be comfortable with halting *any and all* development of Merlin until we have completely solved the issue with metadata, a common component model, and the direction of Avalon? /LS --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
