On Dec 5, 2003, at 8:58 AM, Mario Cormier wrote:
That's how you lose the interest of competent potential contributors. I don't have the resources at this point to maintain a fork of Xindice. It makes sense to me to contribute part of my time to the project so it can improve for everyone (including me). It doesn't make sense to maintain my own Xindice on my own. If the powers that be have moved on to other things (which is their right) but are not doing what it takes for the project to go on living (which is sad -- none of the committers have committed anything for what, months?), then what's happening now is inevitable: some great people notice Xindice, try it out, try to make it work, want to contribute and are ignored, and then they move on.
This hasn't always been the case, it's just the last year or so where committer activity has been really sporadic that it's been a real problem. Having active committers doesn't solve the core problem, for that you have to have the right mix of committers. We had it, but circumstances forced us to lose it and we never fully recovered. Examining the project over the last year shows a different picture then looking at it for the entire time. What I was speaking about is holding committer interest to keep them involved in the project. That requires a balanced set of committers who believe they can make real progress. Supporting the rest of the community, and therefore finding new committers, comes out of that.
Kimbro Staken Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/ Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org
