Danny Angus wrote:
<snipped/>
>
> What I'm struggling with is this dilemma.. If we move api dev away
> from server-dev too quickly then the API changes and James-server just
> carries on with o.a.j.services
>
> OTOH if it stays in "server" we aren't strict enough with compliance
> and/or lifecycle.
>
> What to do? well at the moment I think that we evolve it out of
> server, and *then* give it its own list, but I'm open to suggestion.
>
> d.
<If> the mailet API and the server are to have separate lifecycles, then
mailets should be a James sub-project. As we have seen with other
sub-projects, this means at least a separate source tree and JIRA, but it
needn't mean separate mailing lists.

Personally I'm +1 for a separate list. It will allow others to participate
that have no interest in James server and help isolate mailet issues from
James server issues. IMHO, such a distinction is beneficial.

Once a (sub-)project has a lifecycle of its own there will inevitably be
times when a dependant project, such as James server, becomes out of sync. A
dependant project can either treat this in the same way as any other project
dependency and use the latest trusted release, or we could go for
synchronised releases in the Eclipse Callisto manner. I don't see this as a
problem. Either way looks entirely achievable.

A further thought is where would implementations of the different versions
of the mailet API best live? If we spin out a mailet API sub-project one
<could> argue that the implementations should live elsewhere too. To take
this to its logical conclusion, we would have
1) A mailet api project
2) A mailet implementations project dependent on versions of (1) above
3) The James server project dependent on versions (2) above and by inference
(1) above

Its a little more complicated, but it is clean. One of the main reasons for
doing any of this is because it enables others to adopt the mailet API and
clean implementations of the corresponding mailets. Right now one must grab
James server in order to get them, which is far from clean.

Thoughts?

-- Steve


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