On 10/06/2013 09:44 PM, Christian Grobmeier wrote: > James, > > thank you. > > I believe Commons is in a bad shape. > > Look at Commons Collections. Before 4 years somebody > said Guava is more modern, he his answer seems to be widely accepted. > http://stackoverflow.com/a/1444467/690771 > This guy said we have no generics. What did we do in the past 4 years? > http://search.maven.org/#search%7Cgav%7C1%7Cg%3A%22commons-collections%22%20AND%20a%3A%22commons-collections%22 > > > Nothing. At least nothing visible. Its fine we have a beta. I wonder why > we haven't managed > to officially release this? The last release is from 2008. > > I did consider to put my JSON component to Commons. But I didn't. > Reason: I really need the component > and I calculated how long it would take to release it here. I thought, > it's not helping me > to develop it here. I simply don't have the time. > > I thought a long while about it. > > We had discussions like: do we really need Generics? It works without! > Do we really drop an outdated JDK? We might have users > who run JDK 1.3! And so on. Finally this led us to the situation where > almost all of our users seem to have JDK 1.3 and > are not interested in generics - in 2013. The users who want modern > features go to Guava. We maintain legacy code. And seriously, a lot of > code works without generics. This is no reason to not include them. > > We discuss magic strings in the sandbox. Why? We don't need to discuss > that. Before we release we can simply check Sonar. Safe the time to > discuss. Fix it or leave it to Sonar to report it. > > We seem to think perfect documentation is more valuable then quick > releases. Is it? > > We seem to be proud of our build. I am not. It's complex. It's no fun. > Releases should be do-able in a short time, maybe > even automated. > > It is so sad that lot of good features like Collections with Generics > were blocked such a long time or drowning in discussions. > > I agree we should support old users. But if we don't have the manpower, > we can't support them. They need to accept we are moving on. We are > blocked with our backwards compatible ideas and innovation is far away. > > When I spoke to young developers about Commons they asked me if it still > exists. Nobody of them is interested in our community. > > For the mission statement I would wish to see things like that: > > Commons Components… > > …are released quickly and often > …do use modern JDKs and support old JDKs only as long as they are > supported by Oracle > …we make use of modern Java features when they are available > …can be easily released > …can be released without having 100% perfect documentation or perfect > implementations > …are build by Community who wants to learn, experiment and create new > features more than by Community which wants to be backwards compatible > for a long time > …are allowed to release major versions with api breaks as they want
+1 on all the points above. And I would also like to repeat again that we should not be too afraid to make components dormant which have no community anymore and / or have not seen a release in X years. If new people show up and want to revive a component - perfect, but we should better focus our sparse resources on things that are innovative and widely used. >From my personal experience, it is also much more fun to work with multiple people on a component and being able to have discussions on the mailing list rather than being the sole remaining committer / maintainer. Thomas --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
