Manuel Mall wrote: > Fair enough, btw its not painful for me at all. I have joined > the project with the goal to help to get FOP 1.0 out of the > door in a relatively short timeframe (meaning months not > years). To achieve that I am more than prepared to be > pragmatic in the sense of "getting things working > satisfactorily" than "getting things perfect and at their > most elegant". That doesn't mean I want to hack and slash. > Good design is very important me. But there is still this > goal to aim for as well and compromise may be in order at times. > > And isn't there still FOP 2.0 down the track for another > round of serious redesign and refactoring if so desired? > > Hope this makes sense - especially to the active committers.
Well, I didn't mean to reignite an old debate. However, I think the pragmatic approach that you take is what has caused FOP so much trouble. The FOTree is not only the simplest part of the system, it is the most upstream part of the system. The fact that FOP, four years after its last release, still does not have a working FOTree is enough to tell me that something is wrong. The debate goes to whether one keeps on hacking at the tree with a dull blade or stops to sharpen his axe first. Problem Solving 101 teaches that you break big problems into smaller ones wherever possible. Also, the choice you present in your analysis is not accurate. The debate was not about whether to do it now or later, but whether it should ever be done. FOP had resources in place, actively working on fixing the design, that were stopped from continuing because the FOP developers decided that the monolithic approach was actually preferable. Fixing the design could have been done concurrently with any other development work. Victor Mote
