> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex McLintock [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>
> I'm not going to argue whether or not a rewrite is a good
> idea but it is
> pointless to expect business to pay for the rewrite. Business
> is all about
> immediate results and immediate profit. Just about every client I've
> ever had says something like "Never mind the quality, just
> deliver it ASAP."
If this is true (which I don't neccessarily beleive), then this is a case
where business gets in the way of what I think the ASF is trying to achieve.
We want to make sure what we build is useful to businesses, but we also want
to make sure that it has quality which is sustainable in the long term. If
you ask me, there has been way too much short-term focus by businesses
recently because of market conditions which I don't want to see creep into
Apache projects. Apache and the ASF projects are mainly foundation laying
projects, and you have to make a long term investment in this kind of
infrastructure for it to be worthwhile. I'm speaking for myself only here,
but I hope what I'm saying echos the Apache vision.
> Open Source projects succeed by lots of hands doing many
> small changes. A rewrite
> is best done by one person or small team working dedicated on
> the project.
I agree. Many testers are needed to make sure the rewrite does everything
it did before, unless we have a comprehensive regression test suite. (Arved,
Keiron, and others have been working on this test suite)
> If we have to wait three months (say) for the next major
> release then FOP will die.
> Unless FOP can be developed in an evolutionary way, rather
> than a revolutionary
> way it will fail.
I also tend to agree with this. I predict it will take more than 3 months to
make this really happen. I'm in the final stages of a similar
refactoring/rewrite on a project comparable in size to FOP, and it has taken
6 months for a small team to really do it right. In that particular case we
had lived with and added features to the initial version for over a year,
but it became quickly apparent that the cost of maintaining the old while
adding very minor new features was very high. After the rewrite, we've been
able to add in major new features very quickly, and the overall quality of
the second generation project is much higher. I would love to see the same
happen to FOP.
You are right that we must support the old releases in the mean time.
> After being negative for a few seconds, let me be more
> practical and pragmatic.
>
> What you are calling for is support
> (financial/technical/time) so that people
> can build the basis of FOP V2.00
>
> I'd like to see Fop 0.19 CVS still developed whilst that is
> going on. I think
> you were saying that it is difficult to fund this work
> whilst a redesign is
> going on. Hmmm. Maybe. Maybe not. I'd say that bug fixing was
> easier to
> get paid for than a re-write.
I'm in agreement here as well. I think we need to continue to push bugfixes
and new features into FOP 0.XX. The only problem is resources. It would be
hard for our group of committers to do both. If you look at the Cocoon
1/Cocoon 2 development, I think they had two teams... one to maintain and
bugfix the old, and another dedicated to the new. I think that is what we
have to do for a FOP rewrite. Also, I don't think we're talking about a
complete rewrite from the ground up. We're mainly talking about the core
processing of the fo to area tree. How closely the renderers are tied to
that implementation will determine how much reuse we get out of them.
> Do we have any volunteers to re-write FOP? Anyone with the
> skill and understanding
> to do so?
I personally plan to help, however I cannot be a lead on this as I have too
many other things in my job and personal life that have to take precedence.
I think Karen and Arved have the best understanding of the overall project
and the spec to lead this effort. I hope they have the time, and I hope I
can find the time as well.
-Kelly
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