On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 04:55:40PM -0400, Henri Yandell wrote: > So I'm thinking of raising the issue of moving over to Apache Commons to > projects I am a committer on. I have to convince myself and others that it > is a good thing. So why is it a good thing? > > It seems to me that if I assume the following to be true [from my point of > view]: > > 1) Sharing a mailing list with other languages is not going to help me. It > might help tomcat and httpd, but not the areas I'm involved in.
I don't have much experience with the Jakarta Commons project, so could you explain a little what it is you've worked on and what you're interested in doing? ... > 2) Sharing a CVS module will be painful, that is, there is no benefit and > some minor deficit. What do I get out of being in a cvs tree that means I > have to check tons of stuff out that I don't use? [slightly bombastic, I > can avoid checking it out with knowledge]. If you already have a repository, I see no sense in moving it. > 3) Sharing a website will be painful, that is, it will cost lots of effort > and give little back. There's no reason to share a website, other than to provide common linkage to a logical unit. If we end up adopting some sort of common look and feel, we might be able to run under the same system, but in general I think we should encourage whatever people want to do on their own. Creativity is cool like that. :) > 4) Sharing a build-system will be impossible/painful. Same for a coding > standard. I agree completely. There should be little to no standards in terms of build-systems. Those kinds of decisions are best left up to the implementors. As a Commons PMC member, I am totally against me having any say in the build system of any Commons project. :) > Once those four axioms are accepted, there is no project community, and > therefore no point for the apache-commons project? What else does > Apache-commons offer? A logical unit of reusable components in various languages (some with common functionality in different languages), with communities fostered by the ASF and protected by the ASF. > Now, if there are no other things on the bargaining table, then which ones > of those are ones that Apache-Commons will _not_ budge on? There are very few things we won't budge on. To be honest, I personally am beginning to think it is paramount that we do whatever it takes to bring in whoever is even mildly interested in moving from Jakarta Commons to the toplevel Commons whenever it makes sense. In the end, I think we will come up with some basic rules or strategies that we have used to help us develop reusable components, but if we don't then at least we will be able to describe what practices best allowed us to collaborate on these components. -aaron
