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Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2005 13:45:44 +1100
From: David Crossley <crossley@apache.org>
To: dev@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: Re: [RT] The next shiny thing?
Message-ID: <20051206024544.GA5137@igg.indexgeo.com.au>
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Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
> David Crossley wrote:
> > Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
> > > Daniel Fagerstrom wrote:
> > >
> > > > It is so easy to ditch other peoples work, isn't it?
> > >
> > > Oh, come on Daniel, you're taking this personally.
> >
> > I reckon that Daniel has hit on many important issues
> > related to community-building. If people are not careful
> > then we are going to lose many of our current developers.
> 
> Which is what, more or less, is happening today, albeit at a slow
> pace.

Yep, it is a current and ongoing issue.

> Just look at the commits or try to find common patterns in the
> evolutionary discussion: what you will see is a really small bunch of
> people talking and coding, whereas this community used to have long
> threads and fast paces.

That is part of the problem. Too much discussion,
too fast a pace, and not enough implementation.
I reckon that these are general OSS problems.

> Daniel is right, when you talk APIs people get
> bored: you could look at it from an ivory tower and  label that as
> childish attitude and , or you can do something to change that and
> address the real issue which, to me, is lack of people that are
> confident enough to talk about internals because, basically, they
> don't feel they belong. C3 is, to me, a step forward in that
> direction.

I am talking about a higher level of consolidation,
a level where many people can be involved.

> > > I strongly respect
> > > and admire what you've been doing to push Cocoon 2.2 forward, but you
> > > also have to realize how hard it would be for you to carry the burden
> > > of being the main responsible for such a core part of Cocoon without a
> > > real committment from the community, which I'm not really seeing at
> > > the moment. You should realize how the biggest feeling floating around
> > > the Cocoon community is that we want to do something to make Cocoon
> > > fly and soar high in the skies, instead than strive to survive its own
> > > complexity.
> >
> > Cocoon would have already been soaring if we had
> > polished the system and documented as we went.
> 
> Symptoms, again. Then why on earth the system isn't polished? Lazy
> butts or nearly-to-impossible work?

IMO because people rush off to the next new thing
and do not consolidate their work. To make matters
worse developers generally do not document their stuff
or provide sufficient Samples. So those left behind have
no way to follow, or assist, or build upon and refine.

> Cocoon 2.2 is cleaner, but it
> won't refrain people from telling me how their project could benefit
> from  some Cocoon features, but since the beast is so complex, they're
> just looking elsewhere or implement in-house Cocoon clones. Cocoon,
> today, is a terrific tool if you have complex needs (simplifying hard
> stuff) but it falls short to address the medium to simple stuff, which
> is where the real beef, community wise, is.
> 
> > We would have retained many of the new people
> > that we had attracted. I get the feeling that our
> > discussions are going to frighten the hell out of
> > our existing community. We have not yet solidified
> > our current offering and now are racing on to the
> > next new thing. So why should they trust us to not
> > repeat that behaviour. We are in danger of being seen
> > as a research project.
> 
> I'm surprised to hear from you what to me looks like sweeping problems
> under the rug because they'd scare people away: ...

Nah, i am not against moving forward. I am helping
to identify a core problem with our community.
It is an ongoing sickness that will not change with
any technical leaps.

The alarm bell that i rang above is that users were
told that we intended to consolidate with 2.2, so now
they must be wondering if we are all talk and perhaps
not able to ever consolidate.

> ... to me, what's really
> going on is a bunch of children shouting that the Emperor is naked,
> what I'd actually expect from the community I want to belong to is
> understanding how we are able to identify what the real issues are,
> and address them accordingly.

There are various issues, both technical and community.

-David

> Mind you, having some strong business interests in terms of existing
> projects with Cocoon 2, I shouldn't really be this much shouting about
> moving on in possibly incompatible ways: if I've been repeating from
> months now that we need a 3.0 (remember AC EU?), this is because I
> think that without a clear step forward, all we can do are small steps
> solving our self-induced problems while the world is clearly moving to
> different solutions and scenarios. The Cocoon community has never been
> a (late) follower as we risk of being now: if shaking the tree helps
> regaining momentum, then I'm all for an open discussion about it.
> 
> Ciao,
> --
> Gianugo Rabellino
> Pro-netics s.r.l. -  http://www.pro-netics.com
> Orixo, the XML business alliance: http://www.orixo.com
> (blogging at http://www.rabellino.it/blog/)