the whole build breaking last night because some lameass sourceforge developer doesn't know how to write gump descriptors (even if it was me) annoys the hell out of me. It should not be possible. The basic cause for that happening was the use of the 'href' attribute to link to remote descriptors accessed via webcvs.
Having descriptors live in avalon and cocoon cvses has proven to be a bad idea as well -- its just annoying for people working on gump to not be able to go in and change things, especially when the people with access to the repositories of those projects are doing a bad time maintaining the descriptors (even if it was me).
Having descriptors live elsewhere also makes oversight more difficult. What if some developer changes a descriptor overnight to have him mail himself (for example) the contents of /etc/groups? It's not like we'll be able to ever consider a machine which runs gump as secure, but having all descriptors in one place (under version control) does help a lot, and also makes it easier to see who screwed something up.
The support for the 'href' attribute complicates an already complex codebase and slows gump runs down because viewcvs (which is usually used for this) is often quite slow. This becomes more of an issue when turning gump into an always on webapp, where we probably want to keep the GOM in memory or at least in compiled form for good user response.
Descriptors living elsewhere has proven to be confusing for users, and it has led to duplicate project descriptors on more than one occassion.
With several anoncvs servers (notoriously sourceforge, but its not the only one) lagging behind the work of the developer, having the descriptors accessed over anoncvs slows the work of developers down by heaps when writing or debugging descriptors. Especially because one has to wait for the server before being able to 'ant verify'. This leads to a model of commit-then-verify, which is plain wrong.
Gump is a social experiment, and this part of the experiment has shown to be a negative and annoying factor. I feel that my own recent experiences with jicarilla are an excellent example: even with an active and experienced member of the core gump group trying to actively maintain gump descriptors in sourceforge cvs, things break and the workflow is nothing short of a nightmare.
I suggest we move to strike and loudly proclaim descriptors not living in gump CVS as harmful. Their use needs to be *strongly* discouraged from now on. Who's with me?
-- cheers,
- Leo Simons
(PS: I love writing like this every now and then...it's a writing exercise; don't take it /too/ seriously :D)
----------------------------------------------------------------------- Weblog -- http://leosimons.com/ IoC Component Glue -- http://jicarilla.org/ Articles & Opinions -- http://articles.leosimons.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn't obey the rules." -- Alan Bennett
--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
