Dave Pawson wrote:
> At 17:50 12/12/2001 -0500, Larry White wrote:
> >I assumed that I was missing a jar in my classpath, but was unable to
> >confirm that anything was missing.  And I can't find any reference to
> >this file in either the dbxml documentation or source code.
> 
> Given the fact that the command line interface is so lame,
> I'd have hoped that the classpath additions were minimal,
> but I too spent 30 mins adding to the classpath without luck.
> I still had a 'class not found' list as long as your arm.

Yaknow, there's always a remedy if you think the command line interface
is lame.  You could fix it, or rewrite it.  If you're using the scripts
available, Windows or UNIX, and you XINDICE_HOME directory is set
correctly, you shouldn't have to jump through hoops to get any of the
command line scripts to work.  The jars that are in java/lib should
automagically be added to your classpath for each call.
 
> I still think the documentation is as important as the implementation.

There's a remedy for that, too :)

> Trying not to sound *too* critical,
> Regards DaveP

Well, Gee, you could have fooled me.  

I'm gonna say something personal now, and this is not directed to you
specifically Dave, but to our user community.

For over a year, Kimbro and I have worked our asses of to develop
dbXML.  There have been people who have contributed on occasion, and for
that, we are very grateful, but for the most part, our user community
has used the project, made requests and/or complained about it, but have
left it up to the two of us to do something about it.  We're two people,
and this project is a major undertaking, so you do the math.  Yes, it's
a database, it's not something that's easy to write or maintain, but we
don't need people who know the database internals to make valuable
contributions.  We need documentation, we need better command-line
tools, and better scripts for proper building and behavior on different
operating systems.  These things aren't much to ask for from this
community.

Now that we're part of the Apache project, I suspect that we'll get
increased contributions from those people already working on other
Apache projects, but I fear that our user community will continue to do
as you've done, which is use the project, make requests and/or complain
about things, but leave it up to the Apache people to fix things.  One
of the biggest criticisms of projects like Xalan and Xerces is that
they're company-run and that nobody outside of those company's
contributes to the projects.  Well, there are only three people working
on Xalan, and I don't think they're turning people away from making
contributions.  Niether will we.

We're at the start of something great.  We could make it great for you,
our you can make it great with us.  It's up to you.

-- 
Tom Bradford - http://www.tbradford.org
Developer - Apache Xindice (formerly dbXML)
Maintainer - jEdit-Syntax Java Editing Bean

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