Hi Jody, in principle, I agree. And as a maven user, I don't have a particular problem with it, having javadocs attached etc. and using geotools regularly.
But I still think that there is a huge amount of people that uses geotools as a dependency, not as their primary tool of trade nor main interest. I have heard this particular sort of frustration voiced around a fair bit. These people may download a copy of the necessary jars once, compile, and leave until a new feature is required. You do not want to update your existing codebase then.That's hwy I think the release javadocs should be available, and the default link should be to this branch. Also, I would assume that the javadocs are released with the source/binaries, not filled in post release and only based on feedback. That should be merely used as way of improvement. When starting with geotools a couple of years ago I found it daunting to use features if they are not documented, especially with the recent dramatic changes in some interfaces. I think the how to and the wiki are a great step ahead, but I have troubles with it focus on snapshot release features, instead of latest stable one. Maybe we need to clearly indicate in the how-to new and and stable articles... I think the community could be made more involved in writing these how-tos (and I am ready to help), but a clear indication how to proceed and what are the boundaries should be given from the main developers. Personally, I would prefer a sort of senior-peer review approach, to feel comfortable that what is contributed is actually a good example and not a dirty hack ;) Cheers Martin On 5/7/2010 9:59 AM, Jody Garnett wrote: > Hey Martin thanks for the feedback. > > With respect to most recent javadocs / intros etc feedback is the benefit the > user list provides the developers. Sheltering on the stable branch does not > offer the same reward. In short if you want developers to write docs we are > only going to be able to motivate them to write docs for the most recent > version. > > That said we should be able to make the old docs available for download; I > will experiment with making a doc download when I release GeoTools next week. > > For repositories it is a bit more tricky. Part of the thing is that it is > impolite to turn repositories off - since older projects will still build > against them and we get very much yelled at for breaking other people's > builds. The other complicating factor is that the "stable" repository hosted > at osgeo.org has not been stable in terms of the server being up. > > Still I think there is a good solution: get geotools into root maven > repositories; geoserver manages to get in because they publish to codehaus > which synchronises with the root maven repositories. > > This way we would only advertise one repository for SNAPSHOTs and advise > people to use their local maven mirror for stable releases. > > Jody > > On 07/05/2010, at 5:10 PM, Martin Tomko wrote: > > >> Hi Jodi, all, >> I just noticed this thread and wanted to comment. >> >> First, I think that the default javadoc presented should be the latest >> stable branch.My understanding is that 2.7 is still not a stable >> release, and I would prefer not to be lured into it until stable, and I >> assume others may feel similar. It confuses ordinary users that do not >> follow the development on a daily basis. >> >> I would also prefer if the version number appeared in the url, it would >> make it easy to navigate between versions, somethign i used quite a few >> times with other projects to compare. >> >> Finally, there seems to be a huge number of various geotools >> repositories, and if one only searches for it on the web and does not >> naviagte from the geotools.org website, it is easy to end up there, >> without knowing how recent the javadocs are. These are the ones hosted >> on codehouse, on http://javadoc.geotools.fr/, and similar. If any of >> these are within reach of the community and not actively synchronized, I >> would advocate removing them. >> >> My 2 cents, >> M. >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Geotools-gt2-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-gt2-users >> > > > -- Martin Tomko Postdoctoral Research Assistant Geographic Information Systems Division Department of Geography University of Zurich - Irchel Winterthurerstr. 190 CH-8057 Zurich, Switzerland email: [email protected] site: http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~mtomko mob: +41-788 629 558 tel: +41-44-6355256 fax: +41-44-6356848 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Geotools-gt2-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geotools-gt2-users
