Henning P. Schmiedehausen wrote:
Ahmed Mohombe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Basically removing all the @author tags from the velocity code base
and docs and replacing it with 'Velocity development community' and a
link to the dev-list.
How about doing this?
-1 from me as a user.
In a lot of projects when I had problems, I was able to ask directly the
author(s)
of that class/utility, and this was very helpful. The complete project was too
big
and the work of just too many people.
Yes, and this is excactly what we want to get rid of. None of the code
is owned by any of us and sometimes the person named in the source is
not even any longer around. That is the whole point of community.
If you want to know, which committer wrote a specific line of code
(which is much more interesting than who is mentioned in a file), use
svn blame or the subversion viewer. That is what tools are there for.
Why don't you people concentrate on important things, e.g. like performance?
Send a patch. The idea of a community is not "a few people slaving
away and the rest sitting in the popcorn stands booing and cheering".
The person you're addressing here, Ahmed Mohombe, is an active
contributor to at least 2 other open source projects. He has chosen to
contribute his energies elsewhere. You, on the other hand, wanted to be
involved in this project, so for somebody like Ahmed to tell you that
your record in terms of moving the thing forward is rather poor, this is
understandably unpleasant for you, but to be responding that the other
guy should be doing the work does not strike me as legitimate.
If you have an itch, scratch it. Send a patch. We are happy to apply.
The fact is that there is a long history here of people sending in
patches and nothing happening for years. The latest 1.5 release finally
incorporates a patch offered by one James Taylor in October of 2002 for
supporting map creation.
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.velocity.devel/1245
Yep, that's one of the new features in Velocity 1.5 released in 2007.
The decimal numbers stuff was offered as a patch around the same time, I
think. So, okay, you can say that these patches eventually made it in,
but we're talking about a turnaround of over 4 years.
My guess is that if any patch, at least anything particularly
significant was contributed by Ahmed or anybody else, it would not get
reviewed in any reasonable time. In any case, your record on this is so
poor that it seems disingenuous to be starting with this "where's your
patch" sort of rhetoric.
Of course, asking people in this insistent, aggressive tone "where's
your patch", when they bring up whatever criticism... that is, I guess,
part of the "Apache Way" (though by convention, not a written part of
it, I grant...)
Do you really think the users do care so much about "cosmetics" when the concurrent
products/technologies get real improvements?
At least I do not really care about 'products' or 'technologies'. If
you have a need that the community can not solve, hire a consultant
who can. There are plenty around.
<sigh>
Henning, why are you involved in this at all?
I mean, normally, at least it seems to me, if you get involved in an
open source project, it's in some basic problem space that you're
interested in, and you are interested in working on it, the various
intellectual challenges and so on.
Now, in the case of Velocity, it's hard to see why anybody would be
interested for those basic reasons, since it is so technically obsolete.
I mean, Velocity is not competitive with versions of FreeMarker, its
main competitor, from 5 years ago. Velocity, as a project, has not moved
forward in any real way for years. Probably the entire 1.4 and 1.5
release cycles that took 4 years or more, embody an amount of work that
a single motivated hacker would do in a matter of a couple of weeks.
But really, I follow this list and do not get any sense that you guys
are really interested in the problem space in any real way. So, if that
really is the case, why are people like you, Will, Nathan, involved in
this project? You're so intent on doing this puttering around, rooting
around in abandonware like Anakia that some guy wrote 5 or 6 years ago
and putting out some kind of "new release". And the intent seems to be
to maintain some illusion that the project is not really in the
abandoned state it is.
But the whole thing is cringingly painful to observe really. It's like
extremely unmotivated employees in some government sinecure job,
puttering around doing nth order things, having meetings, and so on,
trying to look busy -- and also expressing all kinds of outrage when
somebody points out that they aren't really doing anything, but even
that is a kind of empty "going through the motions" sort of thing.
But why bother? When some unmotivated employee sits up straight and
tries to look awake and busy when some poo-bah is in the vicinity...
that behavior is understandable, of course. But this is an all-volunteer
thing, for crying out loud. If you don't want to do anything, just don't
volunteer for the thing, and spend the time on some other hobby,
something you are actually genuinely interested in and enjoy. I mean, it
doesn't really make any sense.
Now, I really resent all this because of the overall dynamics of it. You
guys spend all this energy pretending that you have this active project.
Basically you leverage the fact that, once upon a time, some guys wrote
a half-decent web server called Apache, and now all kinds of people
believe that anything with Apache in the name must be great, in order to
waste people's time with obsolete stuff.
If you guys had anything remotely competitive with the current state of
the art in this space, and were genuinely interested in working on this,
I would refrain from making the above comments. And, yeah, it's
politically incorrect for me to say these things, but I don't really
care. I'm satisfied that it is right and proper to make these
observations and ask these basic questions.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Best regards
Henning
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