David Crossley wrote:
We need to have a very clear statement about the
status of "Skins" and "Dispatcher" for the upcoming
0.8 release. This statement needs to reflect the vision
of developers and where the PMC wants the project to
be going.
At the same time we need to be careful to not get
people over-excited about new technologies that are
not quite ready. Remember the mess that we got into
at Apache Incubator.
Users and developers need to know that Skins are
still usable and still the main mechanism.
There is then the Dispatcher work-in-progress that
has reached an excellent stage. We certainly want to
encourage people to investigate it and help to
develop it.
It is my understanding that we have not yet made a
decision about when Dispatcher will be ready, nor
whether it will replace skins or whether both will
be usable as plugins. I, for one, am happy to further
delay that decision, but we need to come up with
some words to define the situation.
What do others think?
It is my understanding that the intention is to eventually have
dispatcher in core and that the current skins functionality will move to
an internal plugin. This means that new sites will be seeded with the
dispatcher as default, old sites will need to add the skins plugin to
their forrest.properties.
It is my understanding that this is scheduled to happen in the 0.9
release, by which time the dispatcher should be stable.
So, my questions are:
1) is my understanding correct?
2) is the dispatcher stable in its implementation? That is, can people
adopt it without fear of their sites breaking or the dispatcher moving
so far from its current implementation that sites will need to be
reconfigured?
If dispatcher cannot be called stable yet then I do not think we should
be encouraging users to adopt it. If it is considered stable then I
think a statement to the effect of "cutting edge users and developers
are encouraged to *test* the dispatcher which is intended to replace
skins in 0.9"
I made a start today with a new document called:
"Status of Themes: Skins and Dispatcher" ...
http://svn.apache.org/viewcvs?rev=398810&view=rev
It's down at the moment - will look later.
Ross
