Good comments all. Numbered responses, please take no offense to anything. If I'm short or offensive please assume that I'm just tired and frustrated with things not related to WiX*.
0. I currently have several tasks that I'm working on that are all "very high priority" right now. The context switches alone are killing me. To maintain some semblance of sanity there are a number of tasks that I have just simply dropped. I apologize because I did not enumerate to people who might be waiting on those tasks that I'm not currently making progress on those threads. Two notes. First, emails like this (well thought out and not particularly inflammatory) are a great way to point out things that need to get addressed. Derek also recently mentioned to me that his WiX v3 changes should really be released soon. Second, on my way to work this morning, I was actually considering taking vacation for a few weeks in the next couple months just to work on all this stuff that isn't getting enough attention. 1. I have not reviewed the autocomplete utility that you submitted and I haven't heard anyone else comment on it. Reviewing the diffs post-July (there are only one or two, I believe) are one of those tasks that have fallen off my radar. 2. The WiX toolset had about 5 years of development in a custom build/source control system. CVS was nowhere in that picture. Sometime in late-August (I think) it became clear to me that the overhead in managing the coordination between the legacy build system and the "public" build/source control system was a key factor in slowing down the process. Around that time, John-Lyon Smith, Bob Arnson, and (later) Justin Rockwood took it upon themselves to convert the internal process (based on build.exe from the DDK) and the external process (hand crafted makefiles that are expensive to maintain) all over to NAnt. This is expected to make my management life much easier. See: http://blogs.msdn.com/jrock/archive/2005/09/08/462827.aspx 3. The NAnt conversion has taken significantly longer than anyone expected. Each week everyone expected the process to be done and it wasn't. I also was increasingly buried and the whole process came to a halt. IMHO, the only person that has made progress was Derek on WiX v3... but he was able to mostly ignore the overhead by simply building on the old legacy system. 4. WixCop is a perfect example of what things have happened. WixCop was a tool that Derek wrote for Office many moons ago. Over time he cleaned it up to a point where it was generic enough to be released publicly. Unfortunately, the tool was being built with the build.exe solution that is different than the makefile system. So, rather than write yet another .mak file (that are getting difficult to keep in sync), I decided to wait until Justin (who had picked up the NAnt baton by now) got it into the NAnt conversion. Oops, yet another change waiting for the NAnt conversion. 5. Looking back now, deciding to wait for the whole NAnt conversion was probably a bad judgment call on my part. That judgment call plus the overhead of managing the legacy system with the CVS system locked up the whole system around me. 6. I actually anticipated being the bottleneck in the process many months ago. I asked for help to manage the build and release processes a couple times. John Lyon-Smith and Subbu Balakrishnan were the only people that responded. Unfortunately, John switched jobs, moved, and bought a new house. And Subbu has had lots of things going on at work. So, at the moment, everyone external is stuck waiting for me to do all these process tasks. By now I probably sound like a broken record. I'm sorry but the speed of the project is currently gated by process junk. The process is being improved and I'm quite willing to admit that I probably put too much hope on the "new and improved process" and have just waited too long. 7. The assignment agreement ensures that there is a single copyright holder on all of the source code. To be clear, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that this is done to improve the defenses the project has if taken to court (say for a patent infringement, everyone's favorite). You could, of course, fork the code and start modifying it yourself. However, my understanding is that if there was ever a case brought against the code then your fork could also be taken to court. In your case though you wouldn't own the copyright to all of the code and would potentially have to get the holder of the copyright to go to court with you. From what I've gathered from the little interaction I've had with lawyers the whole scenario gets legally messy very quickly. This is why you'll see the FSF, Apache Software Foundation (for example: http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt), and many others all have assignment agreements if you want to submit changes. It's a pain and I don't like it (I particularly dislike that the agreement has to be *mailed* in... but that seems to be common across agreements as well). Finally, this is going to get better. I'm not sure an "unstable" branch is really necessary (not a bad idea, though). I have been in a downward spiral on this part of the project for the last 6 months and I think we've just about hit bottom. With a new foundation under us soon (NAnt plus Gabor's suggestion of a "history.txt"), I expect things will improve (especially if I can take off 3 weeks of work and *especially* if other people want to truly step up and share the process burden). * For more background: http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2005/10/15/481464.aspx -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Frederik Carlier Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 8:57 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [WiX-devs] [ wix-Bugs-1328856 ] tallow should create component guids with "PUT-GUID-HERE" (Warning: rant) A couple of months, the issue of generating GUIDs with tallow came up as well. Then I proposed to write an autocomplete utility that, for example, could take the output of tallow and add the guids automatically. I wrote that code and submitted it to the WiX-devs list. It's still pending, with hardly any feedback at all. (Note: for about two weeks in September, my e-mail wasn't functioning. I might have missed e-mails that affected 'my code') It's rather sad to see that three months later, somebody else can write similar code and get it into CVS in less than a week time. CVS is out there for a reason, why isn't it being used properly? WiX only seems to use CVS as an alternative for distributing the source code in a .ZIP file, maybe even only because it is a SourceForge requirement. If my code had been pending for review in CVS, for example, it would have been visible that somebody else has invested time in writing such an utility. I'm sure that if my code were in an unstable branch of the CVS, it already would have been improved a lot. Now nothing happened to it, and it will likely end up being a waste of time. Which is an extremely dissapointing experience and greatly reduces my interest in further submitting code for the WiX toolset. Which is a pitty, because I like WiX. In my opinion, WiX still is a cathedral rather than a bazaar, see the famous writing of Eric Steven Raymond at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ for more information about that. Anybody who wants to learn a little bit more about open source development will be greatly interested in reading the paper. Recommended reading as well is the book "Open Source Development with CVS, 3rd Edition" (chapter 7, for example. is interesting material), which can be downloaded free of charge at http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/. If you reed the paper and the book, I'm sure you'll come to the same conclusion as me, that is, that WiX in se is rather a closed source project that only happens to release its source code and doesn't use a closed source license, than a true open source project. Another thing that extremely bothers me is that apparently lots of tools are in the work (WiXCop, or the tool that is the reason that the CodeDOM was written), without any of the code of these tools being visible in the CVS repository. It mainly reduces everybody who doesn't have access to the 'master' repository (inside Microsoft, if I'm correct?) to distant spectators of an interesting process, rather than active and contributing participants in the development process of a great tool. If the code compiles, why isn't it in the repository? Why can't other people benifit from it? Most of these tools probably address the need of others, other people even may start to write tools that solve the problem, hence, duplicating the effort. If code is written today to add GUID generation support to tallow, and if it is going to be in the next drop, I want it on CVS today! I mean, how difficult can it be to automate the process of synchronising two repositories? One of the great benefits of the open source development process is that somebody has an idea, starts working on it and others help them out. It means that you don't need bug free or rock solid code in the CVS repository (note that for your stable releases, that of course is an requirement), rather, make your code visible and let others help you to both improve the quality of your code and speed up the development process! Besides, I have a technical question about the copyright agreement that is a requirement for WiX and really seems to hurt contributions. I've went through it, and it's a painful process. The explanation given for the existence of the copyright agreement is that it would allow Microsoft to defend the source code if required. However, anybody is free to modify the WiX code and redistribute it without signing an agreement. It would be perfectly possible to fork WiX and create a new project that accepts code from others without the need for the copyright agreement. So, can anybody explain the need of the copyright agreement? This mail may be percieved as a rather uncoherent rant, however, I intended to write it for quite a while. This just seemed to be a good occasion. I think a lot of my complaints could be solved by actually opening an 'unstable' or 'devel' branch in WiX and allowing submissions more easily there. There, code could mature (like cheese or wine :)) and make it's way into the stable branch. Let me finish by saying that well, WiX really has been useful for me. I hope that my feedback in the end will help make WiX only better, Frederik Carlier -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of SourceForge.net Sent: Wed 10/26/2005 8:57 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [WiX-devs] [ wix-Bugs-1328856 ] tallow should create component guids with "PUT-GUID-HERE" Bugs item #1328856, was opened at 2005-10-17 11:14 Message generated for change (Comment added) made by derekc You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=642714&aid=1328856&group_i d=105970 Please note that this message will contain a full copy of the comment thread, including the initial issue submission, for this request, not just the latest update. Category: tallow Group: v2.0 >Status: Pending >Resolution: Fixed Priority: 5 Submitted By: Derek (derekc) >Assigned to: Derek (derekc) Summary: tallow should create component guids with "PUT-GUID-HERE" Initial Comment: Currently, tallow does not generate component guids - this leads to people forgetting to put guids in their components and thus accidentally creating permanent components. It would be better if tallow inserted "PUT-GUID-HERE" for all the Component/@Guid attributes to let users know that they should insert a guid for all the components. This would also make it much easier for someone to write a script that can replace all the instances of "PUT-GUID-HERE" with an actual guid so that they can get their authoring setup the first time. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Derek (derekc) Date: 2005-10-25 23:57 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=518766 This should be fixed in the next drop. Tallow may also have a new unrelated option called gg :-) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=642714&aid=1328856&group_i d=105970 ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today * Register for a JBoss Training Course Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005 Visit http://www.jboss.com/services/certification for more information _______________________________________________ WiX-devs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-devs ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today * Register for a JBoss Training Course Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005 Visit http://www.jboss.com/services/certification for more information _______________________________________________ WiX-devs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-devs
