this is an informal email to test the waters and see what would be the reason for the proposal of Gump as top level project.
As you might know, Gump is the continuous integration tool that is used in the java-related projects around apache. It was built by Sam in a way to test early contract changes in between project dependencies. It is *not*, as many believe, a nightly build system.
Sam described Gump as a social experiment. I still like the definition, but things have changed since Sam decided to step down and follow other interests.
Most notably, the creation of Gumpy, a forked version of Gump that does the same thing and uses the same data, but it was entirely rewritten in Python.
You can appreciate the difference between Gump and Gumpy following these links:
1) Gump -> http://gump.cocoondev.org/
2) Gumpy -> http://lsd.student.utwente.nl/gump/projects.html
Gump was written in a mixture of XML,XSLT,shell scripts and java, Gumpy is written entirely in Python and uses Forrest as the HTML rendering engine.
There is currently a community of 4 developers actively working on Gumpy and since all ASF committers have access to the gump database for project dependencies, it's hard to keep track of how many different people actually contribute to Gump.
In my mind, I think Gump needs to step out of jakarta for a number of reasons:
1) it is *NOT* related to jakarta only (it never was, but being java focused, jakarta was the place to forge it)
2) it is not even using java as a programming language anymore!
3) top level would increase its visibility and would bring more attention to the fact that early-one contract failure detection would massive improve our ability to move forward yet keep massive amount of dependencies (as it's the normal case in the java world, as you can see from the gump numers of some of those project dependencies)
4) the gump development community voted all +1 on the proposal when I ran it thru them.
- o -
So far for the introduction.
Here is my proposal:
1) move Gump out of jakarta and create it as a full ASF project, with PMC and all that
2) setup gump.apache.org on minotaur and let that be the project web site
3) install a running gump on moof or in some of the new IBM boxes (when they come) and proxypass it to gump.apache.org/live (or some other URL like that)
That's all for now, please let me know your comments.
Ah, please, don't impose some "tools.apache.org" or something like that on us: we are not doing this to trade one container for another.
-- Stefano.
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