Hi Jon,
First, I want to thank you for the advices and your
mail - even if I don't like what you say I do believe
that your mail have some good things for me.
> It really scares me that you are the only person (as
> far as I can tell) that is seriously interested in
?> maintaining and developing Tomcat 3.x into the
> future.
Well, at least it's good that there's at least one
person maintaining and developing it - it's a pretty
good product, it'll be scarry if everyone would
abandon it to do other things.
I have no plans on "developing tomcat3.x into the
future" - all I want is finish what I started and I
couldn't do in 3.2 timeframe - in terms of
performance, refactoring, modularity, security.
I don't see any need to go beyond 3.3 - and I said
many times I'll stop doing any major changes in the
core after 3.3 is done. I'll just fix bugs and develop
modules - most of them in my private, non-apache space
( I'm talking about the servlet 2.3 implementation ).
If you look at the code ( and any developer should do
that before arguing one thing or another ), 3.3 is
much cleaner and faster than 3.2 and it's finishing up
what was started.
I would like to thank you for making me "the only
person" maintaining tomcat3.x, but I can't take the
credit for that - all I'm doing is improving great
code developed by other smart people, and even more
importantly finishing up what they've started.
As for the future - in many open source projects good
code does have a future - I hope the same will happen
with tomcat.
> It is not good to have the entire rest of the core
> developers work on Tomcat 4.x and having you sit
> here and say that you are going to work
> towards back porting everything that the Tomcat 4.x
> people come up with on your own.
Well, I don't see anything wrong in reusing good ideas
from tomcat4.x in 3.x - it's in fact the first time I
hear anyone saying it's bad.
It was one of the goals of tomcat3.x to be modular and
allow people to add extensions without affecting the
core - and almost all of 4.x can be back ported as
tomcat3.x modules.
If someone is doing that - people who use tomcat 3
will benefit, and that's good.
> Talk about a complete duplication of
> effort by only a single individual.
That's a great compliment for the design of tomcat3
( unfortunately I can't take too much credit for this
either ) - if only a single individual can do that it
proves ( again ) that tomcat 3 is a great servlet
container and gives me reason to keep working.
> I can't even understand someone wanting to base
> their work on Tomcat 3.x
> when all of the core developer support (ie: more
> than just one person) is going towards Tomcat 4.x.
Better design :-) ? Continuity ?
> I *personally* think that you should either drop
> your Tomcat 3.x development and work towards making
> Tomcat 4.0 have all the features and benefits that
> you want to see in Tomcat 3.x (and thus show that we
I think tomcat 3.x has most of the features that I
wanted - I would be happy to see 4.0 using the same
patterns and design that allow high performance, but I
don't have the time or wish to do it again.
> are all working together instead of this constant >
> fork within the overall Tomcat project) or
It's funny you're telling this as if I'm doing
something wrong or forking - I strongly agree that
forking is bad, and so far I did all I could to avoid
forks ( i.e. I stoped developing the Servlet2.3 module
as part of tomcat3.3, etc).
> simply fork what you are doing into another project
> that is hosted somewhere else.
It's the second time an Apache member is asking me to
go somewhere else. Believe me, right now it's my
biggest wish - I've had more than enough !
> In fact, I'm pretty strongly -1 on Tomcat 3.3. If
> anything it would need to
> be suggested as Tomcat 5.0 because as far as I can
> tell, we have already
> come to the conclusion that Catalina will be Tomcat
> 4.0.
When 3.3 will be ready you are free to vote whatever
you want - I just hope your vote will be based on the
quality of the code and not political interests.
> What I'm most concerned with here is the overall
> Tomcat project goals and
> seeing you duplicating work and effort is really not
> making me happy.
Reuse != duplication
> You should be into
> lobbying people to work with you...not as a "damn
> you all, I'm going to do
> what I want regardless of what you say" type of
> attitude.
I know some people prefer the "do what we tell you to
do or go away " or "we know what is better " attitude.
I don't want to defend myself , and I'll take it as a
compliment - I think it's great to be able to think
for yourself and be able to work when there's an awful
lot of pressure to go away.
As for lobbying - thanks for the advice, I think I did
quite a bit of lobby in the last year and I a tiny bit
of contribution in getting people get involved in
tomcat.
> This is because
> you will never get any other core developer support
> behind you for Tomcat
> 5.0 regardless of how good your code is.
My goal is to finish tomcat3.x - after I'm done with
that I'll continue to support it, but I'll stay far
away from any future development or 5.0 - again, I've
had enough.
> but the issue is that why would anyone want
> to work on this code
> when the rest of the project is obviously more
> interested in seeing mod_warp
> be developed and mod_warp is obviously the more
> complete and forward thinking solution?
And when someone will have a better idea everyone
should jump and stop working on mod_warp and start
with mod_warp+1 ? That seems to be what many people
like.
I understand that, spending time to understand what
other people did and continuing from there is much
harder - but sometimes you get a lot back. And you may
know that your code has a chance from beeing continued
by somebody else.
( I know, everyone claims everything else is garbage
and have to be thrown away - and the replacement will
be perfect - but if you don't learn from mistakes
you'll just repeat them : look at the code complexity
in different versions of tomcat 3 and 4 and you may
understand what I'm saying )
As someone who spent almost 1 year cleaning up code I
should be the first to agree with this development
style - but I don't. Maybe some code looks bad and has
no comments, but there is a smart person who wrote
most of it and there are ideas and lessons behind it.
That's what tomcat3.0, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 have in common
- the code has been rewriten few times, but I hope we
were able to preserve most of the ideas. I hope 4.0
will be able to duplicate some of them.
> We just don't have enough overall developer
> resources to support two
> different forks of the same project going on at the
> same time! This isn't
> good! :-(
As you know, one of the reasons I'm working on 3.3 is
that I think forks are bad. I don't know how did you
got the impression there are 2 forks - tomcat 3.3 is
the continuation of 3.2 in the same way as 3.2
continues 3.1, and 4.0 is not a fork either - it had
almost no code in common with 3.0 - it's a different
codebase, not a fork.
As for resources - I think each developer should be
free to choose to work on what project he believes in.
If you force me to stop working on jakarta or apache
projects I don't think you'll have more resources -
you'll just have one less developer.
But I think I'm a lost cause for Apache anyway - count
the number of commits I did for tomcat3.2, 3.1 and now
3.3, count the number of emails I sent on this list
trying to help people - and compare this with the
feedback I got from Apache people like you and Craig.
Costin
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