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Date: Tue, 06 Feb 2007 11:40:56 +0100
From: Mark Brouwer <mark.brouwer@cheiron.org>
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To: river-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: Drowning in the River
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Dan Creswell wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I've personally been increasingly uncomfortable with the nature of the
> discussion on river-dev (and Jini-Users to a lesser extent), trouble is
> I've not been able to understand why......until now, here's my beef:
> 
> The river-dev list is full of minutae - discussion of coding standards,
> issues on nitty gritty bits of behaviour around locking or
> preferred-lists or when we might get the code drop or testing or
> checkins.  But, I don't care about any of this stuff, why?  Because
> it's irrelevant.

While I share your uncomfortable feelings Dan, I disagree your above all
*that* irrelevant.

The current discussions might not be the most relevant ones, such as
some of your questions, but ultimately the code is coming and there are
people that have issues with the current codebase, I think they should
be able to discuss this here for the simple reason their world is that
way. Also I believe we can discuss issues of different relevance in
parallel, it is a shame however that those now in Jim's summary didn't
get that much attention.

BTW the very first posting in this list was "How to start from here?"
and the responses to that were minimal. Besides people being shy, this
might also be a good indication people are not convinced how to proceed
from here, and in doubt without a single person being able to force a
change, it might be better to crawl on.

> It has no importance whatsoever in the big picture which comes down to:
> 
> WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO WITH RIVER?
> 
> And that question leads to a bunch of others for me:
> 
> (1)	Who's the audience for River?
> 
> (2)	What are we going to deliver to that audience?
> 
> (3)	Why would that audience care about what we're delivering?
> 
> (4)	What should River be about?

Very valid questions of which I admit only 2) has surfaced so far. And I
think my reason for that is that point 2) is something we can 'vote' on.
The problem with 1) and 4) is that they have a huge dependency, and I
think that answering 4) can be a slaughter party as the number of angles
to look at it is infinite (as discussion on jini-users proofed). For me
not having a definite answer on 4), at this time, isn't a blocker for 2).

I believe due to its legacy it ain't a very bad idea we just start with
the more obvious things and see what happens, what comes at the gate,
and how we react to that. This gives us time to craft that roadmap and
in the process hopefully a community will arise that can give a bit of a
coherent answer on 4).

And due to the process here ... it only requires one 'strategic commit'
of somebody to have an issue discussed ;-)

>     One way to do that might be to go back and re-examine the list
> of things Jim Hurley posted a few days ago.......

It was a very long posting to say you supports Jim's idea, but I'm glad
you did ;-)
-- 
Mark