I'm just a user of FOP and I haven't looked at FOP from the
perspective of a developer so far, so I can't comment on whether a
rewrite is needed and all that. What I can do, is to share some
experience from Ant over at Jakarta-land with you.
Arved Sandstrom <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 12:47 PM 6/8/01 +0100, Alex McLintock wrote:
>>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, basically.
Whatever you do, make sure you are not going to break the developer
community with the rewrite.
When we took the first stab at Ant's rewrite, there've been four
different proposals on how it should be (they've been started before
most of us really knew what we wanted to implement for Ant2) and the
result have been two months of flame wars followed by a hard break and
some people leaving ant-dev to create a fork / complete rewrite
somewhere else.
The second attempt was to collect requirements first - we did so in
public by accepting each and every requirement and voting on them
following Apache rules. This was fun and I could recommend that, but
don't think that it really is appropriate for a tool like FOP with a
very clear mission statement as opposed to the rather vague "build
tool".
But now the next step will be code again and I'm not sure that we are
not heading into the same direction as there are several proposals
again. Seeing the friction all this has caused and still causes I'd
completely agree that a rewrite should be done by a very small team of
people - if the community can agree upon that team, and I think this
would work for FOP.
What we've seen in Ant is that development of the existing Ant really
slowed down extremely while we were discussing Ant2. Probably this is
because we didn't have a dedicated team working on Ant2 exclusively
and another team improving Ant1.
Stefan
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