On Feb 20, 2007, at 22:16, József Németh wrote:
Hey Joe,
Let me start off by saying that I was very tempted to let your
posting pass and not give you any more attention, but I just couldn't
help myself, so here we go...
I don't doubt that you, the FOP developers, are a group of good
software
professionals and a bunch of nice peaple. But the way you handle
FOP as a
product development project and relate to the user's of FOP is
downright
amateurish. And for me irritating, too.
Apologies if it irritates you. That is certainly the opposite of what
is intended.
Yes, the style may be 'downright amateurish', as you call it, because
Open Source --as I understand it-- is not governed by the same laws
as your everyday professional commercial software development
company. There is no such thing as a 'strict deadline' here. No
contracts, no customers...
Keep in mind that all FOP devs started out where you are right now: a
FOP user. We too saw features missing, and tried to help out where we
could, up to the point of diving into the code and implementing them
ourselves.
Let me take your answer:
I wonder, how should I have known about the fix.
It would have sufficed to read the first line of the message you got
from Bugzilla, although I do realize now I forgot to paste the link
to the revision that fixed the bug. Sorry.
I specifically looked at the answers to my error report before I
sent my reply and had not found any
indication of it there.
As a user I am equiped with the necessary environment to keep the
softwares
I am routinely using current. In this case using toroiseSVN I have
checked
out the complete FOP trunk just to find that, just as you suggest,
if I want
to use it I should build it myself. I didn't. (To state it slightly
I wasn't
in the right mood.) [In fact I had already installed a different
workaround
before I submitted the bug report.]
OK, so that means that you can easily synchronize the fop.jar in your
project with a scheduled Subversion checkout, followed by a build and
deployment... What are you complaining about?
On the FOP Download page I found this:
"Fixme (jeremias)
Reenable the link to the SVN snapshots once they are available."
Now, what the heck it's supposed to mean?!. Can you tell me a valid
reason
why there are no daily (or at least weekly) snapshot builds of the
trunk
available at least on the main FOP server?
Because someone needs to allocate time to set that up, and the demand
is not nearly high enough to make this a pressing matter. I follow
both fop-dev@ and fop-users@ almost on a daily basis, and I can't
even remember how long ago it was that someone asked for these
nightly builds. Probably those that thought they needed it, finally
came upon a brilliant idea: "Why don't I do the build myself, and
synchronize my local sandbox with the repository?"
As I indicated, this is Open Source. We are not professionals when we
are here. We all monitor this list, respond to postings (even when
they're strictly speaking off-topic), take a shot at fixing long-
standing but annoying bugs...
Why? All /because we like to/
Whether, if or when new features get implemented, bugs fixed,
releases done... this all depends on small human factors, such as a
fop-dev working for a customer: if that customer absolutely needs
features implemented, there you will suddenly see some things
improved in a short time.
Anyway, why should I be at the bleeding edge with FOP Trunk if I
only need a
small, safe and fully tested fix in the 0.93 branch that I can
easily update
if there is a new build available.
Indeed, why should you even have a complete build? If you could
download only the altered class, and replace that in your fop.jar...
Again, schedule an 'svn up' of your local sandbox, rebuild and
deploy. Why waste Apache's bandwidth on downloading much larger
precompiled binaries?
And finally knowing the history of FOP your mentioning of a new
release is
not too promising either.
Please, do no take all this as an offence I have not meant it to be.
Undoubtedly. You were just having a bit of fun, weren't you? ;P
Cheers,
Andreas
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