At 11:10 AM 8/17/2005 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>
>> I wholeheartedly agree. Dropping 1.2 support "just because it's old" is
>> very silly - there must be some -reason- behind that choice.
>>
Did you bother reading both of my responses? Apparently not.
>> Regards,
>> Endre
>
>True, but the reason doesn't have to be technical. If, for a given log4j
>release, the marginal cost (in terms of developer time spent on the issue,
>for example) of maintaining JDK 1.2 support exceeds the marginal benefit (in
>terms of how many users of that release use JDK 1.2 AND would update to the
>given log4j release), that's a reason to dump support. That's fairly
>elementary project management.
>
Amen, Yoav, and that's coming from an Atheist! :-)
Of course, as I've stated previously, there's the other issue of whether
existing releases (not just tagged source, but actual official releases)
work with the stated JDK's. Does anyone know this for sure? Oh, yeah, and
I said "for sure", not theoretically. And since we haven't had "target" or
"source" attributes in the build until very recently, the releases better
darned well have compiled under JDK1.1 (that's the promised level of
support for Log4j-1.2.xx, right?). Did that actually
happen? Doubtful. And given concerns brought to light by Curt, it sounds
like in order to have true clean support for JDK1.1 and 1.2, changes to the
build are needed to be able to build under those JDK's or at least some
clear instructions on how to build with Jikes, also taking into account all
the extra dependencies on libraries not included in JDK1.1 or 1.2 that
exist natively in 1.3+.
Talk of a theoretical possibility of being able to compile the source and
have it run under JDK1.1 and/or 1.2 is pointless if we can't either provide
a release that will actually work under those JDK's (identically to under
later JDK's, meaning no superfluous warnings and such.... and have Log4j
developers verifying that they work) or at least make it easy for someone
to build under (or, at least target) those JDK's. Given the current
discussion, neither of these seem to be true. Either someone takes a
decent amount of time out of their schedule to verify all this or we need
to drop support in Log4j-1.3. We should still strive to support what was
promised for the 1.2 branch. But being that the time and effort involved
in this may be significant and will have to be re-evaluated with every
single change to Log4j-1.3, I see this as a no-brainer to make JDK1.3 the
minimum for Log4j-1.3.
Now, if I haven't gotten the point across that the reason for dropping
JDK1.2 support for Log4j-1.3 is way more involved than "just because it's
old", then I guess I'm talking to a brick wall. Endre (and others with the
same point of view), you may disagree, and I encourage you to explain why
you disagree, but I'd appreciate if you wouldn't simply gloss over what's
been said and then argue that the bottom line for JDK1.3-as-a-minimum
advocates is to get rid of the JDK1.2 requirement "just because it's
old". You were either sleeping or just trying to annoy me.... or both.
>Of course, if there's a developer willing to spend all the time and effort
>needed to support it, so be it. Until we actually run into a technical
>reason.
>
We'll have to see how technical it gets. If it isn't made dead-pan simple
to do under a normal build environment (Any reasonable version of Ant,
meaning probably 1.5 and above, and any reasonable JDK, meaning probably
1.2 and above, both individual developer choices as his/her own environment
demands) and/or if a minority of the committers is willing to put forth the
effort to support this, then support for JDK1.2 really can't be promised...
or it could be, but it would intellectually dishonest.
>On a related note, the adoption rate (migration from older versions to
>latest) for Tomcat 5.5 is higher than for previous branches, even though we
>made a decision to design for J2SE 5.0, and allow running on JDK 1.4 as
>well, but not even JDK 1.3, much less 1.2. We thought it might slow down
>adoption or generate complaints, and the opposite has been true. I'm not
>saying log4j is the same type of product, just providing a data point.
You gave people a little kick in the butt and they responded by keeping up
with the times! Go figure. Good for Tomcat, good for developers. Thanks,
Yoav! :-)
Jake
>
>Yoav
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
