On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 11:44 AM, Mat�as Giovannini wrote:
So why not let Velocity and FreeMarker to follow their own design philosophies and people will have alternatives to choose from based on their different demands?
Because this would be tantamount to letting Velocity and FreeMarker be contenders in a Darwinian tournament whose outcome is solely determined by market force. As long as FreeMarker is more flexible in meeting the challenges the environment poses, it is slated to be the favorite champion. In this setting, Velocity simply cannot choose to stand still, defending its high moral ground: it is stagnation and oblivion.
I apologize for my florid verbiage, but I want to stress the fact that to me the debate is not technical but philosophical, and one that must be fully argued through.
I don't really understand your point. I don't think anyone is arguing that Velocity *must* stand still and do nothing. I think we are all in agreement that we need to get the momentum going again,
I don't know who are the "we" in the "we are all in agreement" part above. In the initial post that sparked this thread, I asked Daniel Rall whether there were any plans for future development.
He answered in the negative.
Moreover, he stated that he saw no particular need for further development because Velocity did everything *he* needed. (My emphasis.) Some months ago, Jon "monkey see, monkey do" Stevens responded similarly when the topic came up. I could go find the post in the archives, but I distinctly remember that he told Peter Romianowski that Velocity did everything he needed and that if Peter needed some feature not present that he was free to fork the code.
What is very striking in both cases is that the Velocity developers in question justify the lack of ongoing development by the fact that the tool "does everything *they* need." It does not even seem to cross their minds that anybody else has any needs. If I had any investment in Velocity, I would find this quite unsettling. Can I possibly be alone in my reaction to this?
So, in any case, just from my reading of the list (are we reading the same list?) it does not seem that there is a strong consensus on this matter. There is definitely a group of people who have expressed the belief that just doing nothing is perfectly okay.
> and that there's > lots of people interested, and we're going to do it.
Well, by all means, go to it.
I will be interested to see what happens. You kow, the problem with letting development come to a complete stop for a year is that now nobody is *in* the code. For example, at this moment, I know the FreeMarker codebase like the back of my hand. If somebody reports a bug or even requests a new feature that is worth having, I can usually deal with it immediately, because I know immediately where to apply the necessary changes. OTOH, if I were to do nothing in the code for a year or more, it would be very hard for me to react to a request. It may just be me (I doubt it) but if there is code I wrote but haven't looked at for over a year, it's very hard for me to get back "into" it.
And then for people who were never in the code to start with, there is a big up-front intellectual investment necessary. People are all making enthusiastic noises now, but... we'll see.... it's just a *lot* of work.
I am wondering why you seem so confident that people really have the gumption for it. After all, for anybody who really wants whatever frequently requested features, like decimal numbers, map literals, fine whitespace control, or properly implemented macros... it really *is* a heck of a lot easier just to use FreeMarker, that already has all these things, than to try to implement it in Velocity. You surely realize that, don't you? :-)
Since we are all in violent agreement on this, what are we discussing?
I think you're discussing how to get the project going again. You are making some progress, since the various messages where people keep trying to paper over things and pretend that everything is hunky dory seem to have ceased. Now, suddenly, you are all in agreement that ongoing development is necessary.
I guess you were always in agreement in this. Any messages by Velocity developers in which they expressed that there was no need for ongoing development may have been imagined by me. ;-)
(No wonder Mat�as is confused.... :-))
Regards,
Jonathan Revusky
--
lead developer, FreeMarker project, http://freemarker.org/
Velocity->FreeMarker template conversion utility, http://freemarker.org/usCavalry.html
FreeMarker 2.3pre4 is out!
geir
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