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Date: Wed, 9 Feb 2005 13:55:47 -0700
From: Bruce Snyder <bruce.snyder@gmail.com>
Reply-To: Bruce Snyder <bruce.snyder@gmail.com>
To: user@geronimo.apache.org
Subject: Re: ANN: Geronimo 1.0-M3 Release
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On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 12:04:01 -0500, toby cabot <toby@caboteria.org> wrote:
> Bruce, Geronimo Team,
> 
> "What we've got here, is a failure to communicate."
> 
> There's a difference between "progress" and "the appearance of
> progess" and both are important.  There's a *lot* of progress
> happening, and you guys are justifiably proud of that progress, but
> the message that you're getting here is that it's harder than it
> should be for "outsiders" to figure that out.
> 
> It's probably hard for people to really understand this if they're too
> close to the project, but as a gedankenexperiment try pretending that
> you're some random guy that's heard about Geronimo and wants to find
> out more about it.  So you go to geronimo.apache.org, maybe look at
> the releases on the front page, maybe click on the "news" link, and
> for 99.99% of the people that's it, they're gone.  I think you'll
> agree that from that perspective the *appearance* of progress is way
> out of line with the *actual* progress.  I think that will probably
> push a lot of people away.  If nothing else, it's troll food.
> 
> So in the spirit of constructive criticism I'll offer a few
> suggestions that I hope will make the *appearance* of progress more
> closely reflect the *actual* progress:
> 
> 1. The code in the svn repo is light years more functional than the
> code on the front page of the website, and releases are disruptive and
> time-consuming (and thus infrequent), so maybe someone can add a note
> to the "Downloads" section of the home page, something like:
> 
>   Geronimo development is moving quickly, so we recommend that you get
>   a copy of the source code and build it, rather than use any binary release
>   that's more than a month old.  By building from source you'll get
>   the latest functionality and you'll also be one step closer to being
>   able to contribute to Geronimo.  Instructions for building Geronimo
>   can be found on the Geronimo wiki at
>   http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/Building.
> 
> 2. From mailing list traffic I've seen it looks as if the source
> releases are broken (at least the tarballs), and they're definitely
> obsolete and unmaintained, so why not just get rid of them entirely?
> People who are interested in the code would be *much* better served by
> getting it from source control.
> 
> 3. A couple of people mentioned that a lot of work is going on behind
> the scenes that can't be publicised because of agreements with Sun,
> etc etc.  So why not add a note to the News page indicating that?
> Something like:
> 
>   The Geronimo Development Team is now working on J2EE certification.
>   Because of our agreements with Sun we're not allowed say anything
>   specific about our status, but we're working hard and making
>   progress!
> 
> 4. There *is* a lot more news about Geronimo than is on the news page.
> Didn't EJBQL just land the other day?  That's significant!  Maybe
> moving news to the wiki would make it easier for folks to add items
> that they think are important.  Hell, if nobody's got the time to add
> items to the news page maybe the link on the home page should point to
> http://wiki.apache.org/geronimo/RecentChanges .  That page isn't all
> that easy to read but at least it's got lots of recent changes to it.
> 
> I believe that a small amount of time spent bringing appearances in
> line with reality would be well spent in terms of saving time by not
> having discussions like this one.  It might even attract more people
> to Geronimo, at least it won't turn them away.  If folks agree with
> the gist of these ideas I can submit a patch to the web site.

Excellent suggestions, Toby. Thank you for the input. 

Bruce 
-- 
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);'
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