Hi. Context: nobody gave an opinion on the arguments which I put forward in these posts: http://markmail.org/message/uiljlf63uucnfyy2 http://markmail.org/message/ifwuijbgjytne6w2
As a consequence, the lack of any development policy, rather than being the touted advantage of the "free world" of Apache, is, objectively, a quite efficient way to push in the direction of the stronger voice, not necessarily backed with the stronger arguments (especially when those are not "technical" but, in reality, "political"!). This has been the subject of another post, that also was not followed by a constructive debate in order to change this community's ways, so that it would not discourage proposals for code evolutions towards a modern use of the Java language. Thus, in this context, I obviously can't know whether "silence is consent" or if people will continue raising objections to my experimenting with the contents of the "random" package, even after not raising concern and/or not engaging in the practical discussions about the proposals. Also, it is disrespectful to let people think that they could work on some part of the library, and then voice an opinion akin to the hidden policy that there exists, in CM, codes that are deemed too sensitive to be ever touched again. My first idea was to make incremental changes in "random". The first few, and little, steps unexpectedly implied a huge amount of work, mainly due to the disproportionate justifications that were being required. It is a fact that even tiny, even no-op, changes meet infinitely more opposition than adding even very large chunks of new code. Hence, I propose that all my recent changes to the "random" package be reverted so that it will match the contents of the 3.6 release (modulo the changes which were explicitly agreed on like those in "RandomGeneratorAbstractTest"). Is that possible? [Luc, as the most experienced "git" user, would you mind managing this, perhaps delicate, operation?] I would then pursue my refactoring in a new package named org.apache.commons.math4.rng where all the modifications, that led to the latest outburst of conservatism, will take place. It will also allow me to further experiment and see where it leads, without having to argue endlessly on every compatibility breaking. In effect, it's a fork of "random" (but within CM). Of course, this will happen in a "feature branch" which I'll create upstream when the renaming has been performed. Then people can see both sets of codes "side-by-side", analyze them, experiment with usage, and run benchmarks of the alternative versions of the RNG classes. Ultimately, if the rift between conservatists and modernists remains, both the "random" and the "rng" packages can coexist in the 4.0 release of the library. Regards, Gilles --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
