David Crossley wrote:
If people have issues with Forrest, then please take them to the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list. It is totally unfair to a new project to just criticise it from afar. We get very few emails to the user mailing list about any issues with Forrest. This seems to be especially the case with committers from Apache projects that decided to use Forrest.
This is *very* important. In cal my time on the Forrest project I do not recall a single question from an Incubator volunteer on our user lists.
In this thread one person encouraged people to visit the archives of the Forrest lists because they were fed up of working with Forrest to get it to where they want. I checked, last post with that name on the dev list was March 2004 and there were no posts to the user list.
How is that working with us? Why is it that I find myself joining yet another list because I hear grumbles in a completely unrelated list saying that Incubator has some issues with Forrest? Why should I, as a Forrest dev, have to join your list?
Even having joined this list, I see almost no contributions to Davids repeated attempts to try and understand what incubator need, so I am still unaware of the problems.
In my opinion the problem is not the tool, it is the number of volunteers wanting to work with whatever tool is in use. This is the issue that needs addressing regardless of whether you use Forrest/Maven/Anakia or some Python tool created specifically for the purpose.
That being said, as people will see from my replies on the site-dev list, I have some sympathy with Leo, and I do agree that Forrest is large and cumbersome for building a simple site. However, I am annoyed at various statements in this thread that claim to represent Forrest as it stands today but in fact illustrate a lack of understanding of the capabilities of Forrest head which is an increasingly stable platform that has been working towards the goals of the site-build project [1] (despite claims to the contrary in this thread).
Current SVN head of Forrest, coupled with Davids implementation of the ForrestBot means Forrest can do steps one through seven of Leo's workflow (with a local install of Forrest being optional). Of course, we are a 0.8-dev project, not a 1.0 project. The solution is not perfect, it is still a 0.8-dev project, and the claimed support needs to be tested and validated in a wider range of projects (currently we only have private dev projects, Forrest test sites and Cocoon-docs)
Step 8 (publishing) cannot currently be done by any tool due to the fact that infra require that the live server to be updated by a pull rather than a push process (for security reasons).
It'd be great to work with the incubator to help validate things, but that requries more than David (and now myself) to support the incubator site, it requires at least a willingness to provide feedback to the Forrest community about what is good and what is bad. I don't see that happening so maybe Leo's Python scripts are the solution (at least they will allow me to not worry about the incubator site).
Ross [1] http://people.apache.org/~rgardler/site-dev/Site-Build.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
