> 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.
It is a tough decision to remove a feature (like href) that has such potential for 'community outreach'. It seems such a good idea (to avoid CVS bound, and distribute responsibility) and that it can't be bad, can it? I think it can... I think we have to review exactly where we stand w.r.t to the Gump workflow, and recognize that we tried to distribute metadata management too soon for the communities. Sure, for an expert Gump metadata is simple, but it does have a lot of complex choices (to support reality). The combinatorials of Gump metadata (when merged) are quite daunting. With no generator/wizards/overviewer/compiler/tester we are expecting the community to throw metadata up to us and hope it runs. That is counter productive to our goal of happy communities. Gump metadata is like having a complex development in a runtime interpreted language with nightly runs based upon untested code in a repository. This is analogous to punch cards & batch runs and requests more patience/discipline/investment than communities will give. [Heck, this *is* the early days of my writing Gumpy in Python checking in to test remotely, prior to getting some unit tests. ;-) Hard, hard, work --a frustrating bad development environment.] > 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? I think we are in a state where this is a good thing, for those that can. Gumpmeisters need to help communities (until we code tools, wizards/whatever to help generate that.) I don't think 'hrefs' are themselves the core problem, but deprecating them help bring things into the hands of the experts, so I am for it. > (PS: I love writing like this every now and then...it's a writing > exercise; don't take it /too/ seriously :D) ;-) Adam --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
