As you already may have noticed, the Avalon community has a new roadmap and has a common sense about their future. This roadmap includes: burying ECM (which is deprecated anyway), burying Fortress and burying most of the Excalibur stuff in the long term. The goal is to have one single container which is Merlin (or based on Merlin). **NOTE** Please, if you want to discuss the future of Avalon or if you think that this decision is not good or not correct or whatever, don't use this thread or the cocoon dev list. Go to the Avalon dev list please and discuss it with the responsible community. Thanks **END NOTE**
Now, we have a lot of experience with ECM. Some of us helped developing it and we are using it for so long that there isn't really a problem for us with ECM. So the 2.1.x line has no problems with these decisions. But for 2.2 this is a little bit problematic. We started with the move to Fortress which is now officially dead. Unfortunately the move is not finished and even if it would be finished, we would be incompatible wrt to configuration to 2.1.x. So there is imho a lot of work to do to get Fortress properly running for us (note "for us", Fortress is running very well but not that compatible to ECM configuration). So actually, there is not much sense to continue this work as we have not much knowledge of Fortress. We recently started digging into it. On the other hand, we don't have any knowledge of Merlin now and Merlin is currently not compatible to ECM (or more precise to the configuration ECM uses). So moving to Merlin would result in the same situation as moving to Fortress. And in fact it would be more difficult for us as Merlin is different from ECM/Fortress in it's design and implementation. Our 2.2 release is not about using the best container available, the release is about implementing blocks. This implementation is container independent, so it shouldn't play a role what container we use for blocks. In addition 2.2 is now independent of the container implementation as well, so it doesn't play a role for the 2.2 core. We could simply switch to any container if it supports the old ECM configuration style to 100%. So, it seems, the best way to move forward and get into blocks development is to revert to ECM in 2.2 for now. This is a very simple work as 2.2 is container independent. It would 2.2 make immediately usable and compatible to 2.1.x and we could focus our development effort on blocks - which is imho more important than focusing it on container development. If during blocks implementation the need for a better container arises, we could switch simply to any container supporting the ECM configuration style. And: if noone volunteers, I can do the move to ECM over the weekend. So, please cast your votes - and please, now flame wars about Avalon this time. Thanks. Carsten Carsten Ziegeler Open Source Group, S&N AG http://www.osoco.net/weblogs/rael/
