Discussion about my work should probably be separated from discussion
about the project guidelines.  Here are my responses to the posts
relevant to my work.

===
On 5/30/06, Antonio Gallardo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] escribió:
> I only mentioned my fork to support my ideas about improving trunk.  I
> only started the fork because I was in a high-speed car accident, my
> brain was damaged, and I needed a project to prove my technical skills
> were fine.
I didn't know that and I hope every thing is ok.

My abilities seem fine, but headaches create delays.  All the work of
the last 3 months should have taken me less than 2 weeks.

> But none of my ideas are "good".  I am not part of the development
> effort because my ideas have been completely spurned.  Every
> suggestion I have made about Lenya has been discarded by the other
> Committers.  Most of the issues discussed on the dev list were fixed
> or avoided in my fork because I fixed the architecture.  Attempting to
> pass that knowledge back to the 1.4 developers generated this
> complaint.
I've been in different Open Source communities since 1999. In this few
years, I learned the real power of an open source community is in his
diversity. The capacity to see the same problem from different points of
views. The ability to find different solutions, different improvements.
This is what make us strong. At the same time, I learned often people
needs time to digest new ideas. I can say, it's natural, because our
human nature is usually against changes. When an idea is not welcomed at
the first introduction, we should prefer to give people some time to
think about the issue and return to it later, perhaps in a couple of
weeks the community can provide a better input or welcome the idea.

That's what this thread is about.  If enough devs are willing to
rationally consider a radical change, then my work becomes a major
contribution.  If they do not like it, then it was just an aberration.

> I did not start the fork because my suggestions are disdained.  I did
> not do it to hurt the project in any way.  I needed to write code, and
> could use a better version of Lenya.  I'm scratching my own itch for a
> few hours each week.  My code and ideas are unwanted in trunk, so how
> does my private work hurt the project?
I just can say: Wow! I wondered where you had been. Reading this mail is
sad to me. Not because of you, solprovider, I cannot express how much I
appreciate your openess. It's sad because seems the whole community
situation is already worse than we expected. The ASF is mostly about
communities, the code is not the most important. At the same time, I
will like to point you to Rules for Revolutionaries [1]. Please take 5
minutes and read it.

Good link.  The question is whether the Lenya project is willing to
have a revolution.

> I would enjoy adding a branch at ASF, but why do it?  It would risk
> splitting the effort between the current 1.4 and a simpler, easier,
> more flexible version.
I will like to see your version. Is there a demo?
> The programmers enjoy working on the complex
> version.  The users who would benefit from the easier version  could
> not add value to it.
Sometimes it's not the case. ;-)
> The fork is probably better as my private project.
Please reconsider this.

I do not want to keep the code private.  It just did not seem likely
there was any place for it in the Lenya project.

===
On 5/30/06, Andreas Hartmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I hope you don't feel offended by Thorsten mentioning your fork.
I don't think it was meant as an accusation, but he rather wanted
to substantiate the statement that the community needs a stronger sense
of collaboration and joined efforts. Sorry, of course Thorsten can
speak for himself :)

Do not worry about offending me.  Having my ideas ignored made me sad
that the project would lose them.  It was not personal.  Either the
ideas were too advanced for the other devs, or the other devs were too
focused on their current work to consider alternatives.  I am still
here, right?

> But none of my ideas are "good".  I am not part of the development
> effort because my ideas have been completely spurned.  Every
> suggestion I have made about Lenya has been discarded by the other
> Committers.
 From my point of view, that's not generally because we dislike the
ideas, but because they are too far away from the current state
of Lenya. I find many of your proposals regarding the repository API
(e.g., the naming of classes etc.) very interesting and useful.

See Antonio's link about evolution vs. revolution.  When I first
proposed those ideas, Lenya 1.4 was just started.  That was the proper
time to implement the revolution.  I was not a Committer yet, and did
not have the influence to force such a drastic change.

And AFAIK your improvements of the search engine are appreciated and
used by the community.
OT: Has someone committed the latest changes to search from my website
for 1.2.5?  There have been several small but critical bug fixes.

===
On 5/30/06, Michael Wechner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> The programmers enjoy working on the complex
> version.  The users who would benefit from the easier version  could
> not add value to it.  The fork is probably better as my private
> project.
I am not sure if I understand you on this. Can you explain a bit.
For instance I do a lot
of things within svn.wyona.org/repos/public and I think it would be bad
if I would upload everything
into the Lenya SVN just because I am a committer and have the
possibility to do so. And I think
every committer should behave like this so it seems to me that you are
doing the right way.

Most of the reason to keep it private is because it is not fully
usable yet.  I am not shy about releasing code on my website.  Much
effort has gone into 1.4, and much of it would be discarded for the
simpler version.  My version is based on Lenya 1.2.2, and much of the
code in that version could be discarded if I was not concerned with
backwards-compatibility.  While there are not many LOC, my code is not
a patch; it is a major refactoring.  Not because I rewrote the code,
but because there are new protocols that bypass most of the current
code.  How will the other devs feel about using something that
obsoletes most of their work for the last year?

===
On 5/31/06, Thorsten Scherler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
El mar, 30-05-2006 a las 02:13 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] escribió:
> I only mentioned my fork to support my ideas about improving trunk.  I
> only started the fork because I was in a high-speed car accident, my
> brain was damaged, and I needed a project to prove my technical skills
> were fine.
That is perfectly alright, but having this work in the ASF rep would
help to review your ideas and we benefit on a project base.

Are you certain?

> You are aware of the fork because I mentioned it in the thread about
> handling extensions.
Well, you mentioned it a couple of times in different threads, sometimes
you refer to this work as lenya-1.3.

What do you call a major revision based on 1.2 with most of the
functionality of 1.4, but simplified?  I do not like
"lenya-solprovider".  "lenya-1.3" makes it very clear it is
backwards-compatible with 1.2 but not 1.4.

> But none of my ideas are "good".
We cannot really evaluate them.

Every idea was discussed on the MLs.  They are documented on my
website under "Suggestions".  There were some changes during
implementation. (The SitetreeGenerator does not sort as I originally
suggested.  It is too easy to sort the results later with XSL.)

> I am not part of the development
> effort because my ideas have been completely spurned.  Every
> suggestion I have made about Lenya has been discarded by the other
> Committers.  Most of the issues discussed on the dev list were fixed
> or avoided in my fork because I fixed the architecture.  Attempting to
> pass that knowledge back to the 1.4 developers generated this
> complaint.
This is a phenomenon that we need to resolve as community that's why I
started this thread.

It seems to me that one solution is to create a branch and check in your
code. This way we have a pool of ideas and architecture enhancement that
we can use.

Regarding the complains of others, we need to find a more productive way
to discuss this points in this community. Having code examples is
helping me personally a lot more then dry discussions.

The project can have the code.  The issue is the code is not usable.
It needs the ability to edit documents, the admin screens need to be
changed, and search needs to be reconfigured.  The rest of my ToDo
list is enhancements.  Would the code be disdained because it is not
fully functional yet?  Would it be better to wait until I complete the
basic functionality?

> I did not start the fork because my suggestions are disdained.  I did
> not do it to hurt the project in any way.  I needed to write code, and
> could use a better version of Lenya.  I'm scratching my own itch for a
> few hours each week.  My code and ideas are unwanted in trunk, so how
> does my private work hurt the project?

Yes and no. IMO it hurts the project not having your code. We are
losing valuable ideas.

Let me state crystal clear (in the name of the Lenya PMC) that your code
is wanted. Let us create a branch and see how we can reuse your work in
the trunk.

OK.  Now?  Or when it is usable?

> I would enjoy adding a branch at ASF, but why do it?  It would risk
> splitting the effort between the current 1.4 and a simpler, easier,
> more flexible version.

Actually I do not see this risk. Since now you are the only one working
on the version but maybe people will join you and we can enhance the
trunk as well.

As I wrote above, this is a major refactoring.  As a project, we do
not have the resources to maintain two trunks.  While my version is a
much better upgrade path for anybody using 1.2, what happens to users
of 1.4?  Would someone write a migration function for them?  The code
does not have JCR support yet.  Adding it will be easier than the
first attempt, but it is still more work.

> The programmers enjoy working on the complex
> version.
I consider myself as programmer and believe me I do *not* enjoy working
on complex things and I would love to see a simpler version.

What if you have spent months developing the complex version?  Are you
willing to discard your work?  Are you willing to offend everybody
else that contributed?  If we do not use my code, I will not be
offended.  If we do use it, we could offend everybody that
contributed.

We also delay the next release again as everybody learns the new
architecture.  It should take less than a day to learn; I am not
joking about how this version is much simpler.  I would publish
documentation to make it even easier.  Then we need to integrate an
editor and fix the admin screens.  That will take another month at my
current rate of progress.  It might be done in a week if all the devs
committed to it.  The odds of that happening seem rather low.

Tell me how you want to handle this.  Submit now, or wait until it is usable?

solprovider

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