Andrew Savory wrote:
On 23 Oct 2005, at 19:20, Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
...
* We really need to get rid of obsolete stuff. Must really every
single block go to 2.2? Are there some oneman shows that better
could be returned to their creator and driven on source forge or
Cocoon-dev?
Hmm. I'm not convinced of this. The problem is that we can't
anticipate which blocks our users want, they may have perfectly valid
reasons for using e.g. the SQL Transformer (even if we wished they
didn't). I don't know how we can remove historical functionality
without upsetting -someone-. I'm not sure how this can be solved ...
Keeping old junk forever means growing administrative work and less fun
for us. It also means that everything gets more complicated to change
and evolve over time. It doesn't seem like a good way to attract new
developers and keep the old ones.
Apache is about community it is not about aniticipating user needs. If
users have needs they can convince developers to solve them, pay
developers to solve them or become developers.
We are chosen as committers as induviduals and not as representants for
our companies. From a community stand point I would say that it is time
to deprecate the SQLTransformer. As a representative for my company I
would rather say: no way, we have tons of code that depend on it. It is
a complicated question, but I don't think that the answer is: I need it
at my work so the rest of you should support it.
I think that a better answer is that in such a case it would better
become my and my companies responsibility to support it. It could happen
inhouse, at SF or in some legacy area in our repository.
I don't think that we should let our community be choked under the
weight of historical functionallity because we are afraid of upsetting
someone.
You have certainly heard that the key to success is to focus and be
really good at doing one thing. Do we have a focus? Are we really good
at one thing?
The hard thing is to prioritize, it is easy to add but it is hard to
remove. But it is not impossible take a good look at the Maven plugin
matrix that Jorg pointed to:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Maven+Plugin+Matrix. They have
removed things and assigned different priorities to different plugins,
are we strong enough to chose?
/Daniel
