At 18:05 21.12.2005, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote:
Here's my opinion: the value of an apache
project is its community, not the code. Code can
be fixed *waaay* more easily than any personal
issue or personal opinion (that, yes, can be
changed by not by means of a svn commit).
JackRabbit needs to be able to handle all that.
WebDAV interoperability is a nightmare and Slide
is far ahead of JackRabbit on that front.
But should we integrate or simply learn from the code?
I honestly don't care, whatever it's easier and
it seems to be that since there is a community
of interested people here, probably an
independent effort is easy to manage and avoids a lot of political discussions.
I fully agree with Stefano. What's important is
the community behind a project not the code.
Other Apache projects had some hard time because
some committers and other lead developers left
suddently the project (e.g. Jetspeed 1.x a few
years ago which restarted again a few months
later, from scratch, with a new team and
delivered Jetspeed 2.0). In fact the same can
also happens tomorrow to Jackrabbit. What if Day
decided suddently, for some strategical and
financial reason, to stop their ongoing investment in Jackrabbit?
So let's not focus on the name of the project.
Whatever it is: Slide 3.0; DAVrabbit;... what is
important is that the community behind is large
enough to develop and maintain, on the long run,
a good DAV library. Lots of time has been spent
on Slide during the last years. There are
certainly a certain number of practices, hacks,
workarounds we may reuse and combine with
Jackrabbit. But as of today both of the
communities are quite small. So why not trying to
plan to make something more thin, reusable, sexy,
standard, etc... all together rather than trying
to keep both projects separated? That is the key
question. Nobody never spoke about reusing the whole Slide code as is....
On our side (=jahia.org) we would be ready to
help for such a project. We are currently using
Slide to store our customers binary files (ey!
Jackrabbit did not exist 3 years ago ;-) ). As
mentionned by other Slide users, we are also
encountering a certain number of issues with
Slide. So we have the choice of trying to
continue to make some light workarounds and
patches (in fact what we did for the last 18
months) or start again with a new DAV layer. I am
personaly +1 for the latter. In fact, in our
roadmap, we plan in all the cases to refactor the
Jahia back-end to support JSR170 (= Jahia 6.0 -
2007) as soon as we released Jahia 5.0 (Q1 2006)
and there are a certain number of reasonnable
chance we will refactor the whole based on
Jackrabbit rather than trying to make a whole new
JSR170 implementation ;-). So why not inserting a
Jahia 5.5 in between by only starting to move our
current DAV based "document system" to
Jackrabbit... Briefly speaking we will be ready
to help and invest ressources in 2006 on such a DAV project!
So will it be in a Slide 3.0 project, in a
Jackrabbit DAV extension, in a new dav.apache.org
top level project, I do not really care if we can
gather a good community of interested people all together...
Stéphane
