On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Daniel F. Savarese wrote:
suggested enhancements to the respective code bases. Given the widespread use of the software and its inclusion in commercial products like WebLogic and WebSphere, I think Jakarta's shepherding of these projects has done a lot of good.
Yep, supporting stable yet inactive projects is definitely worth doing. While Alexandria and Watchdog are not believed to have any active users anymore, ORO and Regexp are likely to have active users for a long time.
I'm +1 to changing the projects list on the site to represent some subprojects as dormant/dead and others as stable/inactive.
As more programmers migrate to J2SE 1.4 and 5, I really don't see any demand growing for oro and regexp. There are many things that could be done to continue development of the projects, but is there really a demand? I don't see it.
The only vague interest I have for a new ORO would be if it supported the Perl 6 changes to regexp. I imagine it'll be a while before Sun match these.
As far as what to do, I don't think the projects need separate foo-dev and foo-user mailing lists. But it may be an unnecessary imposition on infrastructure to merge them into just [EMAIL PROTECTED] Here's a spontaneous and ill-thought suggestion. As a first step we could have a "Legacy Products" or "Dormant Products" section between "Products" and "Related" on the Jakarta pages. We could list dormant
Oops, I +1'd too early :)
projects under that category. Then we can solicit volunteers from the PMC to be committers for each project to ensure that each has at least three. Volunteering means you agree to review and adddress patches and bug reports, vote on releases, etc., but not necessarily undertake new development initiatives (unless you want to). I volunteer to play that role for regexp and I'm pretty sure Vadim wouldn't have a problem doing so for oro. That gives us two committers for each and we'd need a third. From Noel's comments, it
An important point of a dormant project would be that the 3 PMC volunteers are specified somewhere; preferably on that projects site. Technically we have 3 PMC members on every subproject, but the reality is that often their interest level does not match the fact they have CVS access.
First we need to ensure oversight (3 PMC members monitoring the project) and then give the projects a shot at revival. Anyway, that's just a spontaneous suggestion I haven't thought through.
I like it.
What do we do if we can't find the volunteers?
With respect to oro and regexp specifically, one of the following might help even though I don't really expect them to reawaken: 1. merge oro-dev,regexp-dev,regexp-user,oro-user into just regexp@
Very tempting to start by moving the two oro lists over to the two regexp lists. While oro is the fuller codebase, regexp has the better name.
2. or move them into commons
No rush I think, but long term a useful idea. My interest in oro/regexp is such that I've been able to easily see that Vadim and yourself were maintaining sufficient oversight on the two regexp projects. The worry would be if the two of you vanished/idled/got bored.
3. or actually merge the code bases into one and work on a new API
(I don't see this happening because it's a pointless exercise when
there's no demand)
Yeah, pointless.
Hen
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