Christopher Schultz wrote:
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Jonathan,
Jonathan Revusky wrote:
I simply pointed out that the reasoning offered for wanting to remove
the @author tags was quite tenuous, to say the least.
You did more than that... you went on to bash the project and its
current members, which was completely unnecessary.
Okay, Christopher. You object to statements I made. That's fine. You
refer to them as "bashing". Fine. What I would like to understand is
whether you object to any of the statements on the grounds of them being
false?
For example, in a previous exchange with Henning Schmiedehausen,
(probably about a year and a half ago) I objected, when somebody asked
about the status of this project, he said that it was active and "always
had been". My objection to the statement was that it was plainly false.
If, for example, my pointing out that somebody is being less than
truthful is an example of bashing, I will bash away with a completely
clear conscience.
At the point in which I entered this @author tags discussion, and my
comments that you characterize as bashing occurred, Henning told Ahmed
insistently that he should submit patches. I pointed out that there were
patches that had sat around for periods of 4 years and more without
being dealt with.
Consider this message from one Peter Harrison:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.jakarta.velocity.user/11154
I quote the last paragraph:
"I'm not being critical for its own sake - I believe in Velocity, and my
work depends on it. I would like to see it improved. I would like to
take part in that improvement. But I need to know that those who control
the process will release my work in a timely manner."
There is no reason to doubt this poster's sincerity. Mr. Harrison
expresses clear interest in even pitching in and helping, but obviously
is extremely ambivalent about doing so. He has extreme doubts as to
whether, even if he were to contribute patches, that they would be dealt
with "in a timely manner".
The best guess, based on the history of this thing, is that if Ahmed
were to take Henning up on what he said, and actually burn the midnight
oil and come up with some significant patches, that the work would be
ignored; at the very least, it is a distinct possibility. Given this
state of things, I think a reasonable interpretation of things is that,
when Henning tells Ahmed to send in patches, it is just a certain kind
of bluff, a way of telling the guy to shut up.
What I can't
understand is why such a hater is on the development mailing list.
I already asked Jason Pettiss whether he truly did not understand my
point or was affecting that he didn't. I have not had enough dialogue
with you to ask such a question, so I am just going to make perfectly clear:
I do not object to the basically abandoned state of the project. I do
not object to your using it; use whatever you want.
What I do object to is people misrepresenting the state of an open
source project. I also basically do object to the whole thing of
somebody using a well established visible OSS project as a
self-promotion vehicle and not really having any interest in doing the
work that being involved should entail.
JSP still dominates the world of enterprise Java. [snip]
That's a rhetorical question, I hope. I mean, we both know that the
reason that JSP is so dominant is marketing/placement. I can't see what
fruitful discussion can be had about that.
It's certainly not marketing, but definitely placement. People use JSP
for the same reasons they use Microsoft Internet Explorer, Media Player,
and Outlook Express... because they are there and it's easier to use
them instead of finding something better.
<sigh> The distinction between marketing and placement and visibility,
say, is basically quibbling. It is obvious why JSP is so widespread and
it has just about nothing to do with the quality of the thing.
Struts and Velocity and other projects on apache.org receive far more
attention and usage than they would ever get based on their objective
technical merit. Surely everybody knows this. And I don't really
complain about this specifically; such is the world. However, I don't
think that pointing out a fact like that, forthrightly and in good
faith, is tantamount to "bashing".
But anyway, you do have the problem that, when something gets that much
attention and so on, that people will try to get involved with things
for reasons that are not those typical of why an open source hacker
typically gets involved in a project.
However, that does not make it justifiable for people to be trying to
mislead others about the true state of [Velocity]. Other people, if the
state of the project is honestly disclosed, may decide that they prefer
to depend on something that really is being actively maintained and
developed.
To what are you objecting? The fact that Velocity advertises itself as
an "active" project? That just means that it hasn't been completely
dropped on the floor.
Christopher, it is not clear from the above whether you don't understand
my objections or whether you understand them but consider them invalid.
There is definitely a confusion there. Could you clearer about that?
And again, as for my supposed bashing, do you object to it on the
grounds of it not being truthful or do you simply object to it because
people shouldn't be saying negative things (even if they're true)
because we should all just be one happy mutual admiration club and so
on? (You may have to think about this, because you probably haven't
grappled with it... I mean, it makes you uncomfortable, and so on, but
when pressed as to exactly why, you may not actually know on a conscious
level... it's worth thinking about)
I actually appreciate the conservative movement of this project. I don't
have to worry about upgrading to another version every few months just
because someone out there had an esoteric itch to scratch.
Esoteric itch... Well, for example, decimal arithmetic is not that
esoteric. A patch was contributed for this in late 2002, and finally
Velocity 1.5, released in early 2007, finally has decimal arithmetic.
Now, maybe you didn't need that "esoteric" feature, okay, but other
people did. Obviously, people who did need that could well have been
tearing their hair out at that kind of rate of progress. I mean, to ask
basic questions or make basic comments about the state of this project
in that context (comments that are bound to be kinda negative) is sort
of normal, really. Frankly, if you cannot see that, it is, I guess,
because you don't want to see it... the implications are troubling...
IMO the
maintainers of the project believe that the product as it stands is
powerful, robust, and efficient enough to be useful. There's no need for
a kitchen sink because the product is darned good in its current state.
On what basis do you say it's so darned good?
I mean, just out of curiosity.... Have you at some point performed a
dilligent comparison with other tools in the same space?
But again, I only ask the above out of curiosity. I don't object to you
using this or whatever else you use. I object to people misrepresenting
the state of something -- for, AFAICS, their own careerist,
self-promotion purposes.
(Note that, lately, there have been some folks looking into some
performance issues, which I think is a good thing... but that's not
going to change any features... just performance of existing ones).
Well, actually, there are unlikely to be any significant performance
improvements. For two reasons. First of all, a template engine with this
basic approach probably cannot be made *significantly* faster. The basic
approach of walking the parsed tree and outputting stuff based on the
nodes cannot AFAICS be made faster by enough of a factor that it would
make any practical real-world difference. I don't see where you'd get
anything close to a binary order of magnitude. Second of all, anything
that requires any real work is not going to happen here. More bashing
perhaps. However, just do this little experiment. Scan the last several
year's worth of messages on this dev list and see how much of it
concretely is about hacking code, and what percentage is about
procedural stuff, like moving stuff around in SVN or moving to being a
top-level project, or blah blah. If you do that, you'll see that the
negative characterizations are accurate; there's no gumption to do any
real work.
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
- -chris
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