On 23/12/2007, at 9:35 AM, Jerome Lacoste wrote:
I'll take the example of the webstart plugin. It's a 2 years old plugin, and although the next release is supposed to be 1.0-alpha-2, I consider it to be good enough for production. The reason it is not yet 1.0 is that I want to keep the ability to make changes to the configuration before 1.0.
Then I think you need to ask - is it really good enough for production? A large number of users will simply not use it if they are concerned it's subject to change.
Besides, if it's two years old - isn't that configuration pretty stable? If not, what is it going to take to make it stable? I would suggest you call it 1.0 now, meet the other criteria (though in webstarts case it probably already does) and *if* you need to make that breaking change in the future, call it 2.0 and tell everyone how to migrate to that.
The Maven ecosystem needs a culture change from everything being an alpha. It's really become an excuse to not finish anything, and it has caused a raft of problems: it either doesn't get adopted because it's pre-release, or it does and then the developer is forced to not make breaking changes (despite it being "alpha") or make them and annoy the current users.
This is certainly not isolated to Mojo, but I think it's a place we can take simple steps to make a change - it won't affect current users, and it can immediately set the tone going forward.
I also use some plugins like the shitty one which are not 1.0 but that I would gladly consider using on any project.
Yeah, I'm not saying they shouldn't be used, just that some clearer expectations are set.
And frankly, I hope it will push plugins to try and aim for simpler, more complete first releases, and to continue that trend with more frequent, complete releases after that.
Does all that make more sense?
Misc: +1 on the Jira project per project (there should be a checklist of things to do when releasing a project ouf ot the sandbox)
Cool.
-1 on the test coverage as a criteria
Yeah, I think that would be premature. :) Cheers, Brett --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
