> On Oct 6, 2013, at 1:11 PM, Oliver Heger <oliver.he...@oliver-heger.de> wrote: > > Hi Christian, > > Am 06.10.2013 21:44, schrieb Christian Grobmeier: >> James, >> >> thank you. >> >> I believe Commons is in a bad shape. >> >> Look at Commons Collections. Before 4 years somebody >> said Guava is more modern, he his answer seems to be widely accepted. >> http://stackoverflow.com/a/1444467/690771 >> This guy said we have no generics. What did we do in the past 4 years? >> http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cgav%7C1%7Cg%3A%22commons-collections%22%20AND%20a%3A%22commons-collections%22 >> >> >> Nothing. At least nothing visible. Its fine we have a beta. I wonder why >> we haven't managed >> to officially release this? The last release is from 2008. >> >> I did consider to put my JSON component to Commons. But I didn't. >> Reason: I really need the component >> and I calculated how long it would take to release it here. I thought, >> it's not helping me >> to develop it here. I simply don't have the time. >> >> I thought a long while about it. >> >> We had discussions like: do we really need Generics? It works without! >> Do we really drop an outdated JDK? We might have users >> who run JDK 1.3! And so on. Finally this led us to the situation where >> almost all of our users seem to have JDK 1.3 and >> are not interested in generics - in 2013. The users who want modern >> features go to Guava. We maintain legacy code. And seriously, a lot of >> code works without generics. This is no reason to not include them. >> >> We discuss magic strings in the sandbox. Why? We don't need to discuss >> that. Before we release we can simply check Sonar. Safe the time to >> discuss. Fix it or leave it to Sonar to report it. >> >> We seem to think perfect documentation is more valuable then quick >> releases. Is it? >> >> We seem to be proud of our build. I am not. It's complex. It's no fun. >> Releases should be do-able in a short time, maybe >> even automated. >> >> It is so sad that lot of good features like Collections with Generics >> were blocked such a long time or drowning in discussions. >> >> I agree we should support old users. But if we don't have the manpower, >> we can't support them. They need to accept we are moving on. We are >> blocked with our backwards compatible ideas and innovation is far away. >> >> When I spoke to young developers about Commons they asked me if it still >> exists. Nobody of them is interested in our community. >> >> For the mission statement I would wish to see things like that: >> >> Commons Components… >> >> …are released quickly and often >> …do use modern JDKs and support old JDKs only as long as they are >> supported by Oracle >> …we make use of modern Java features when they are available >> …can be easily released >> …can be released without having 100% perfect documentation or perfect >> implementations >> …are build by Community who wants to learn, experiment and create new >> features more than by Community which wants to be backwards compatible >> for a long time >> …are allowed to release major versions with api breaks as they want >> >> Cheers >> Christian > I agree with many of your points. Another example is [csv] which is > about to be released for ages. Here, I think, the main impediment is > that we try to come up with a *perfect* API because due to our rules of > backwards compatibility it is so difficult to correct any mistakes later. > > I still think that backwards compatibility is very important, but we > really should define a process which allows us to experiment with new APIs. > > As a suggestion to improve this situation, could we agree on an alpha > release process allowing us to push releases with the aim of getting > community feedback? Where we explicitly state that incompatible changes > are possible (and likely)? > > We did something similar with [collections] 4, but there were many > limitations (the release was not allowed to be uploaded to Maven central > for instance). If we did such experimental releases more often, there > would hopefully not be the fear of defining a broken API, and we would > see more releases.
+1 let's agree on how to do alphas. Phil > > Oliver > >> >>> On 6 Oct 2013, at 20:30, James Carman wrote: >>> >>> All, >>> >>> The Apache Commons project seems to be languishing as of late and we >>> need some rejuvenation. Perhaps we should try to define our mission >>> as a project. What are our goals? What do we want to accomplish? >>> Who are our users/customers? What non-functional qualities do we want >>> our software to exhibit? How do we want to conduct ourselves? How >>> often do we want to do releases? What else? >>> >>> Sincerely, >>> >>> James >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org >>> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org >> >> >> --- >> http://www.grobmeier.de >> @grobmeier >> GPG: 0xA5CC90DB >> >> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org >> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
