I'm not exactly sure what you want to know or why but I will attempt to clear a few things up.
First a bit of history. About 1.5 years ago FOP reached a stage where the original design could not support adding functionality. It started approaching a "big ball of mud". More effort was put into making a mess rather than achieving a useful output. This continued for some time, gradually getting worse. At the same time over last year the amount of people involved decreased, especially in diversity. The number of users kept increasing. The only significant reason for the problems is the complexity of the layout process. The solution to this was a "redesign" which we undertook last year. Personally I prefer not to call it the redesign, that makes people think some magic must happen before they can get involved. The fact is there are still a number of things anyone can do without concerning themselves with the layout process. From here on we have a base (in cvs HEAD) that will continue to be positively built on until it is ready for a release. So the information for the new design (which of course you have read :) http://xml.apache.org/fop/design/index.html So now we still have a very complex problem to solve which is what Peter and Arved are looking at outside of FOP cvs. The number of people involved has been increasing which is a very good sign, also the number of users appears to still be increasing. The approach is to communicate information as best as possible so users have fewer questions/problems by improving the wesite and the FAQ, this is still an uphill battle. The information for developers is being improved so that more may get involved. At this stage of the design very few core problems can be solved in isolation. So if someone wants to implement for example keeps or a colour property, it has an impact on almost everything else in the layout. So what is needed and what will make all the difference right now is more involvement on things like the website, FAQ, configuration, external interfaces, image handling etc. Regards, Keiron. On 2002.03.15 12:24 Nicola Ken Barozzi wrote: > Sorry, I didn't know. > I still think that it's strange that the redesign effort is done outside > of > FOP CVS, but now it's clear to me that you didn't have another > possibility. > It's some month's I've been on this list, and my longer experience on > other > lists made me wonder about the current status of FOP. I thank you for > taking > your time to explain. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
