Wow is it really that time of year already? It's time for the Annual
Revusky Flamewar! Yay!
Jonathan: they're talking about removing the @author tags because, as
you guessed, there IS an international conspiracy! But what you don't
know is you're the center of it all!!! This goes beyond software
Jonathan-- they're watching your every move, waiting for the perfect
moment to strike. It all starts with @author tags. Just wait.
Ahem.
JSP still dominates the world of enterprise Java. Even though it was
obsolete years ago, technologically inferior for a long time, and a
royal PITA to support. And should I point out that by your standards,
it was a dead, inactive project circa 2001? So why is it so widely used?
Meanwhile Velocity has always been a popular alternative and in my
opinion a superior one. Doesn't matter the experience level of the
user: they always enjoy using Velocity more than JSP and get quite
annoyed when they have to go back and support the old
servlets/taglibs/include files/tag files/pre-compilation garbage.
Velocity is:
- Ideal for rapid development
- Suitable for non-technical users
- Simple: very nice learning curve
Oh and, as of 1.4 anyway, was simple enough that I was not hesitant to
adopt it, because the codebase was so small and straight-forward that if
I needed to make it quirky, I could.
FreeMarker is a nice product but the grammar is already so darn quirky
that I'm pretty sure the code is tangled enough that I might think twice
about messing with it. Also FreeMarker is so freaking anal retentive,
which defeats the reason I moved to a lightweight template language in
the first place.
Velocity 1.5 is gaining some good features but is also getting a little
quirky. That, I don't like. Regardless, my users are still going to
prefer
#if( $foo > 42 )
#end
over
<#if foo > 42>
</#if>
and that's just how it goes. Even if the latter makes more 'sense'.
--jason
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
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
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
