Mailing-List: contact ant-dev-help@jakarta.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Message-Id: <3.0.6.32.20001221111744.00b78320@latcs2.cs.latrobe.edu.au>
Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 11:17:44 +1100
To: ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org
From: Peter Donald <donaldp@apache.org>
Subject: Re: Analyzing Bessie (Was: Whoa Bessie...)
Cc: <ant-dev@jakarta.apache.org>
In-Reply-To: <B6657825.1B5E8%jon@latchkey.com>
References: <3A402B20.6C45CCBD@collab.net>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

At 08:40  19/12/00 -0800, Jon Stevens wrote:
>on 12/19/2000 7:44 PM, "Jason Hunter" <jhunter@collab.net> wrote:
>
>> This situation with internal forks is hard because who gets to have the
>> fork with the original name?  I think in the situation where such a
>> decision needs to be made it should be decided by the overseeing PMC.
>
>This is the final real question in your excellent analysis. Therefore it is
>most interesting to me.

yep.

>Given that James is not only the President of the PMC, but there are other
>people on it like myself who no one likes at this point so whatever decision
>I make, everyone will hate me for it. :-) There are also people on the PMC
>whom I think might not really care about the future of Ant as much as the
>people on this list do.

agreed.

>As a result, I'm not certain that the PMC is the right choice for doing the
>vote. It would be similar to trying to hold a meeting to decide futures in
>the states and not inviting all the European people (note that wasn't my
>intention for the meeting at all...I just need to clarify that for all you
>people who still don't get it).

;)

>It would also be giving a group that may not have the technical best
>knowledge of the proposals (or the time to go back and read all the archives
>of the list) the decision over what the future should be. Not good IMHO.

True but I hate to say it ... but technical elegence is not always the top
priority I think. The best thing about Apache is the people and not the
code. Aim for technical elegence if at all possible but try not to piss off
to many people ;)

>Anyway, my personal opinion, which no one probably wants to hear at this
>point, is that I think that things have progressed far enough down this path
>of hell that it will have to be up to the entire list to focus and come up
>with an agreeable solution that everyone likes. This is actually what I
>wanted to do with the in person meeting: assuming enough of the core people
>could have had made it.

agreed ;)

>I will say that some people, especially those who have contributed
>proposals, should be open enough to not having their entire proposals
>accepted. I would assume that the entire proposals are not horrible, but
>instead have good ideas mixed in with some not so good ideas. Thus, I would
>want to see the people with the proposals try to push their good ideas into
>one unified proposal that everyone likes.

I guess I am that some ;)

>So, maybe one way to start this off would be to get everyone who has done a
>proposal to come up with a list of their favorite ideas and then gather
>those together into a master "wish list". This could also serve as a nice
>functional specification document (FSD). Then, once that is done, people can
>work together on an implementation of the FSD because they have an agreement
>on what the FS should be. It would need to be agreed in advance that this
>FSD and implementation would then become Ant 2.0.

good idea. WIll have to wait till post new-year when more contributors are
back thou.


Cheers,

Pete

*-----------------------------------------------------*
| "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind, |
| and proving that there is no need to do so - almost |
| everyone gets busy on the proof."                   |
|              - John Kenneth Galbraith               |
*-----------------------------------------------------*