> I know I don't contribute much to the project. I am merely a user
> that began using Avalon recently. I hope to become a contributor
> to the project, but for now, I'm not. So, it's probably not really
> my place to make any comments here.
Wrong. Unless you speak, how can anyone listen to you?
I'll start with a brief overview of Avalon's history, as much for
David's benefit as for my argument. (OK, David, here's some context
for you):
At the beginning (for our purposes, although the history goes further
back than this) we had Avalon Framework (the classes in
org.apache.avalon.framework.*) plus some other code. That code
included Excalibur, which is a package of components and component
managers - utility classes and a toolkit for building applications
with avalon. It also included Phoenix, which is roughly the same type
of application - an application server - that the standalone,
command-line-launched Merlin is today. I'm not saying they are
equivalent, but they play similar roles.
This was all before Merlin was created.
Some projects used Phoenix and Framework, some used Excalibur and
Framework. For examples of the former, see james.apache.org, for
example of the latter, see cocoon.apache.org.
Fast forward a bit, and a guy named Stephen McConnell creates Merlin.
The purpose of this is to show you that Avalon is much bigger and used
more wider used than Merlin. Merlin isn't all of Avalon, and Merlin
users are a *minority* of all Avalon users. Finally, when you say that
"What has impressed me most about Steve is that he is really concerned
with the project's users" you pretty much hit the nail on the head in
one important aspect that you are not even aware of yourself. And
that's what this discussion is all about.
Merlin is a path that diverges from the path chosen by those of us in
the "old guard" - the bunch of people dependent on Cocoon and other
pre-Merlin architectures.
Now for my personal thoughts: I think that your equating of "Merlin
User" with "Avalon User" precisely captures the problem I have. It is
the thought that what is good for Merlin is good for Avalon, and if
you non-Merliners don't get that, then tough. I think that the support
and concern that has been given to those of us who don't share
Stephen's vision has been abysmal, even though we have done concession
after concession, in order to enable the vision of Avalon Planet.
-oOo-
Now for the compromise:
You want to evolve Merlin into Avalon Planet. I want a stable
Framework 4.x. My suggestion is this:
+ Framework 4.x moves to excalibur.apache.org. No package renames or
class renames.
+ You bump Framework to 5.0.
You can replace 4.x and 5.0 with some other version numbers, maybe
4.2.x and 4.5 or what have you.
This gives you 100% flexibility to do whatever you want. To "just get
on with it". It gives me (and I think Berin as well) the stability we
need to drop out of Avalon completely, and stop wasting our and your
time.
How about it?
/LS
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