I just want to make it crystal clear that my opinion/rant is not an attempt to brow beat other committers into coding action. I said that I did not know about other circumstances and that I was not judging anyone, and I REALLY meant it. So, Ceki, don't feel you have to defend or apologize for any time you spent on the book or anything else. It is not a point I am trying to make and it would be counter-productive even if I was trying to make it. And besides, the book is a huge contribution, everyone agrees (I just want to find it on a store shelf at my local book store...have it sitting on my shelf at work...guess I'll have to bind my own copy. :-)
> Mike McAgnus' code did not fall through the cracks. It was implicitly > rejected. I guess that is news to me. It wasn't explicitly rejected as we never said we rejected it. We just haven't merged it. But I think that is more a resource constraint issue than a decision to "implicitly" reject it. Our July contribution to the Jakarta newsletter stated that we would be merging it once the 1.2 branch was merged into the main branch. That was my understanding at the time and no one balked (I was the editor that month). So, I think that "fell through the cracks" is a fair assessment. The only remaining issue I was aware of at the time was how cryptic the escape settings could be. Now, with Mike no longer participating, I am reluctant to merge the changes. If he was still participating, he could take point to fix issues and answer questions, not as a committer but as a highly active developer. (Of course, if he kept being so active we might have considered offering a committer position; those pesky folks that keep posting ideas, code, and patches...:-). I also want to say that I do not perceive the current state of log4j and the community as "dire" or "doomed". I don't want to give anyone that impression. I do think that jdk logging is the "easy/default" solution, and yes, we should spend some time "marketing" log4j to overcome this to some extent. In a side-by-side comparison, log4j will win out. If it doesn't, we will fix it. I do feel that good ideas/code don't make it as far as they should sometimes. The responses that folks have posted have been great, very productive, and prove that there are folks out there contributing. After all that, I do feel that we need to do more to foster active participation in the development of log4j at all levels: ideas, code, q&a, documentation, you name it. Kind of what Richard was getting at when talking about the community as a whole. I think that we all agree on most of those points. The active committers will need to dedicate some effort to making this happen. And hopefully it will lead to more active committers being admitted to the project through participation and merit. Actually, it is the only way it is going to happen. 1) Create areas on the wiki where users/contributors can put ideas/code/patches. Advertise them to the user list. Spend some effort to fill out the faq as good questions get answered, etc. 2) Create pages that describe how to create/submit patches, etc, where to put them for review (I think enhancements in bugzilla is a good idea). Spend some effort reviewing them. The interested community can participate in the reviews, not just committers. 3) Create the sandbox cvs. Move servlet, selectors, and filter packages into it. Open it up for submissions on the user list, let people know it is out there. I don't think it is viable to open it up to "user" level committers (Apache bylaws don't seem to have the idea of different levels of committers), but if we spend some effort to put useful submission into it, maybe that will be good enough for now. And it will protect the core release from excess baggage. (I can send the request to create the sandbox cvs, and I'll move the packages into it.) ? -Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
