Jonathan Revusky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 08:50 AM, Eelco Hillenius wrote:
Maybe this is a subject to start a new list on. It's really not the kind of
discussions I joined this list for.
Jonathan comes over every now and then to let us know about the great new features in FreeMarker.
In my defense, on this occasion, Henning Schmiedehausen did ask me for a list of features that FM had that were lacking in Vel. And I provided that list.
Yes. And it was nice from you to compile it. Thanks again.
You're welcome, Henning.
However, I'm getting a bit tired of this dialogue. It was quite amusing for a while, but now, all of a sudden, I'm finding it oppressive -- all these layers of pretense, and I think it's time to strip some of it away.
Henning, you requested the list of "significant features added to FreeMarker" and I posted it. However, the truth is that I only posted the list because it served my purposes to do so. I did not believe for a moment that you were requesting the information because you were sincerely interested.
IOW, I assumed that you were posturing. It's not a paranoid conspiracy theory or anything. It just stands to reason. You see:
Had you been genuinely interested, you would have pretty much immediately gone to http://freemarker.org/ and taken a look around. Then you would have noticed that there was a link to a CHANGES doc on the left side navigation bar and you would have clicked it and hit this page: http://freemarker.org/docs/app_versions.html
This details all the changes and additions in FreeMarker 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, and the new development version, 2.3. A similar CHANGES doc is available for most OSS projects. Had you been interested, you would have clicked around and hit this, and thus, would have had no reason to ask me for a list of the changes. So I concluded that you weren't really interested and were asking as a matter of form. Posturing....
And, okay, then, after I posted the list that you were ostensibly requesting, you wrote a response that strongly suggested that you had not read through the list I had provided -- *at your request*.
So, the above is the chain of reasoning I went through to draw the conclusion that this was all fun and games.
Now, what is sort of sad and pathetic about this is that I get the feeling that you think that you're being clever. But you're like a little dissembling child that any adult can see through. I mean, the honest-to-god truth is that I am engaged in a couple of different private email exchanges in which the main subject is just how blatantly obvious this posturing of yours is. I mean, there are various different people laughing at you in private, Henning. It's a big joke. That's how blatant it is!
<sigh>
But don't feel so bad. It's not just you. There's just so much of it around here. I mean, you have Geir Magnusson and other Velocity people trotting out this purist MVC templating philosophy stuff. Surely everybody knows by now that this is a bunch of sophisticated post-facto rationalization for the fact that they have done nothing for over a year!
C'mon. Doesn't everybody know this?
As I said numerous times, you or any other FM developer or user is happily welcome on the turbine-dev list to suggest how to implement FM support in Turbine, help developers willing to do it how to do it or simply send in patches.
Well, sure. It's an open community, isn't it?
It's nice of you to invite me over, but I will decline the invitation. I don't have any more time for such fun and games now. It was fun for a while, but it's like eating too much ice cream. You get a bit of a sick feeling in your stomach....
I have already confided more or less that I have perceived you as a mega-clown and have been enjoying laughing at you. I know that's not very flattering... (And it's not necessarily even flattering wrt me either, but it is the truth....)
But now I'm a bit tired of it and don't feel like indulging any more.... I figure that if I just brutally lay it all out, we might be able to just stop...
But I (as a Turbine developer) listen to the demands of the people that send me mail and/or post to turbine-users. I just sent out a question to this list whether anyone of the subscribers there needs/wants FM support. I will listen to the response. If there is no response or interest, there will be no work in this direction until either the day comes that _I_ will need it or some other developer implements it or simply a customer pays me for it.
<sigh>
Henning, there is a basic fact about all of this that I wonder whether you can really deal with. This is the basic fact:
I don't give a ****.
I have said it before, but nobody seems to believe this. There is a tacit assumption that I am lobbying you guys, *begging* you guys to include FM support in Turbine. However, that is not the case. I really do not care whether you support FM or not. And FWIW, *I* do not engage in phony posturing. When I say I don't give a flying ****, it really does mean that.
Yet, one Mike Williams tried to flame me today by saying that I was "demanding" that you guys include FM support. I don't know where he got that from. It's like, no matter what I say, there is some basic assumption you guys operate on that we're here in some supplicant position asking you for something.
Meanwhile, I have no recollection of ever asking you for anything. I and the rest of the FM community have put a lot of effort into developing the best java template engine available. If you want to leverage that work, you can. No strings attached. If you don't want to take advantage of that body of work, well... we're not going to come begging for you to do so. The very idea seems absurd to me!
Now, meanwhile, it is obvious to me, that if you have a web app framework, it's better to support FM as well as Vel. And it's even better to support yet another tool, say. It provides more options for your users. And there really are a lot of appealing features in FM that are unavailable in Vel.
Look, choice is better. Your whole discourse has been to phrase things in terms of "why on earth should you support FM" when everybody seems okay with just having Vel. Well, even if I vote for the same political party all the time, it doesn't mean that I favor a one-party system. For one thing, the fact that they can be voted out keeps the party in power honest. And it's better that people have choice, right? If you don't want to provide a choice to your users, that's fine. They're your users. I don't care. Why should I? But this whole rhetoric, like there's an onus on *me* to explain why you should provide options to yours users.... it's sorta crazy really...
Once again, there is no cabal. You would be surprised that there is neither a "unified front" of jakarta developers nor a "wow, it's Jakarta, it must be better than anything else" attitude in the Jakarta projects.
Well, the fact remains that Turbine used to support 3 different template engines. You pulled the support for two of them, leaving only support for Velocity -- which does happen to be another Jakarta project. Also, Velocity was the template engine of the three that was not being developed or maintained.
You know, it is almost impossible to conceive of such a decision being made on purely technical grounds. Hence, people tend to assume that it was made on non-technical grounds. That's the general belief out there. You really have an uphill battle in terms of trying to convince anybody otherwise. OTOH, don't sweat it. I don't really care very much.
I'd suggest that you come over to turbine-dev or turbine-users to discuss this further and we leave the velocity lists to the velocity people.
I appreciate the invitation but I think I have already stated about as clearly as is possible that I am not interested.
If you want to support multiple template engines, that's fine. If you want FM to be one of them, that's fine too, and we'll even add Turbine to our "powered by" page in that instance. But we're pretty indifferent.
But I must say, that the tone, the insults and even the assumption of
"hidden motives" that some of the postings from FM developers
contained were quite strange, considering the fact that I as a person
wasn't involved in removing the code
Well, if it wasn't your decision to do that, then I don't know why you're even concerned with defending the decision. <shrug>
AFAICS, it was obviously a bad decision. I mean, it's better for people to have a choice, isn't it? I mean, if you support 3 template engines, what is the real justification for removing that choice? I don't get it...
And surely you realize that. That's why you want to bring in a template-engine-neutral layer.
nor did I have any opinion (or even knowledge) about the deeper inner workings of FM before this thread (I have now and I have a first impression of the people working on the project).
Well, we're honest, straightforward people who just don't take bullshit from anybody. That's all.
And we're a very effective community. It's amazing what you can achieve if people don't expend a high percentage of energy trying to bullshit one another.
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky -- lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/ FreeMarker-Velocity template converter: http://freemarker.org/usCavalry.html FreeMarker 2.3pre4 is out!
Regards Henning
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