At 23:06 29.01.2003 -0800, you wrote:
> Being a niche product, log4j cannot never attract hordes of
> developers. Tomcat, JBoss can. Log4j cannot. Log4j does not cover an
> area wide enough to keep everyone busy and interested. However, open
> source still works in the case of log4j albeit differently. Developers
> come up with a great idea, suggest it on log4j-dev, sometimes even
> implement it and then leave, rarely to be heard of again. That's
> cool. It is just not the fairy tale world of "The Cathedral and the
> Bazaar". No! Actually it *is* the "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." In
> the bazaar, things just don't go according to the original plan. :-)
The example that disturbs me the most is the code that Mike McAngus
submitted for timezone/locale support in pattern layout. He submitted
patches, which we reviewed. He made changes based on those reviews and EVEN
created test cases. Test cases! When was the last time any user submitted
working patches with test cases? Make that person a committer! :-) But,
for what ever reason, the task lost momentum. I feel that I have failed as
a champion of those changes. I don't know if Mike is still around or not.
I sent him an email after the v1.2 merge occurred, but never got a reply.
Here was a guy that was dedicated to making a change to something that he
(and others) perceived as needing fixing. Dedicated beyond the bounds we
normally see. He probably got annoyed with the process/lack of support and
walked away. Maybe he is still on this email list, waiting for one of us to
say "ok, let's merge those patches". We can still apply his patches. I
still have the code on my machine or it can be dug from the mail archives.
But it disturbs me. What do we need to do differently to better support the
Mike McAngus' of the world? Do we feel that this is an isolated case? If
this happens often enough, don't we risk alienating the developers we are
trying to serve?
Mike McAgnus' code did not fall through the cracks. It was implicitly
rejected.
> Actually, I am extremely happy with the current state of affairs. Two
> active comitters might be just the right size for a project like log4j.
I wouldn't exactly call log4j a "niche" product, but it is fair to say that
it is not going to get the attention and momentum of some other jakarta
projects. I wouldn't expect it to. I don't agree, obviously, that 2 active
committers is the "right size". Even commons-httpclient has (at least) 4
active committers and that is just as "niche" as log4j.
I think that with more active committers we will be able to better support
ideas, initiatives, and submissions from the user community to make log4j
better. It will be healthier in the long run. But just making people
committers won't work; the process must reward/recognize merit, effort, and
interest.
+1
I'm still +1 for logging.apache.org, but we need to flesh it out.
-Mark
--
Ceki
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