On Nov 21, 2009, at 4:41 AM, Doug Bateman wrote: > So that's the question... would it potentially be beneficial to > consolidate some of the projects? What do we lose? What do we gain? >
The developer community around many of the commons projects is small. Looking at the committer lists can be deceptive since people may not have been active on a particular project in quite a while. Putting projects together that are largely the same set of committers could make sense. But grouping lang, collections, etc with logging would not make a lot of sense to me. And it would be a huge problem if they were all packaged in the same jar. This would also make it much harder to upgrade a project to a new code base with different requirements as each of the subprojects would have to agree. In short, I would be in favor of this only if it somehow would increase the size of the developer community in the projects. Otherwise I'm not sure the benefit is really there. It seems to me that the items you list in your benefits list can mostly be solved in other ways. 1. "Simipler dependency management" - assumes that each project generates a single jar. My guess is that they wouldn't, in which case this benefit doesn't exist. 2. "Easier refactoring" - Since commons committers can commit to any project this can already be done. 3. "Easier corporate approval" - My experience with corporate attorneys is that if they like the Apache license then you will get blanket approval for any project under that license. They won't care if it is 3 or 37. 4. "Less bewildering" - I'm not even sure how to quantify this. How would this help the end user figure out what Configuration and Digester do and how to use them if they are combined? It seems to me this would make this worse since they are designed to do fundamentally different things. It might make sense if the grouping you are suggesting happened on the main Commons web page so that they user didn't immediately see 37 projects but instead sees a small number of groups with a clickable + next the them. So clicking on "Language Projects" would show those projects. > > > vfs > - JDK: 1.4 > - Required: None > - Optional/Provided: None You must have been looking at the root pom.xml. The dependency list for vfs should look more like: Required: commons-logging, commons-httpclient Optional/Provided: ant, commons-net, commons-collections, jdom, jackrabbit-webdav, jsch, xml-apis --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected]
