Re: Empowering the Developers

[Peter Royal <pr...@apache.org>]

On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 08:19 PM, Peter Donald wrote:
> I actually consider "empowering the developers" and "empowering the 
> community"
> as synonymous. People who are given the ability to effect change are 
> much
> more likely to contribute and work with the community. The "community" 
> and
> "developers" are one and the same or at least they should be.

How about 'symbiotic' rather than synonymous? Since developers are part 
of the community, but are not the entire community. It takes the users 
in conjunction with the developers to form the community.

> Avalon has many separate subprojects that are each maintained by 
> different
> sets of developers - each different set of developers should have 
> control
> over the code they contribute to. In all other Apache projects this is 
> the
> case. I have already pointed the Jakarta/XML projects. You say this is
> different from Avalon situation ? I disagree.

I think the similarity is that you have a group of developers that have 
a common focus (Java/XML/COP), and multiple code bases where developer 
participation is mostly mutually exclusive. We differer from 
Jakarta/XML in that we don't have partitioned CVS access per code base, 
which is similar to jakarta-commons (as you mentioned).

The difference in Avalon is that all of our projects/products extend 
from a common core that we control, Avalon Framework.

> In Avalon we used to partition by respect but that respect evaporated 
> long ago.

I think a lot of that is growing pains. My perception of the past is 
that much time and effort were spent improving Framework itself. Since 
v4, effort has shifted more to component and container design.

The non-overlapping groups of developers work okay with component 
design, because if you have a component that does what you need, its 
not that bad. With containers on the other hand, we have some extreme 
differences in the architecture/nomenclature used in the three(!!) that 
we are actively developing, Fortress, Merlin and Phoenix.

And container architecture is a very personal thing (imho). It is 
potentially a work of art, and if one does not agree 100% with how one 
is designed, there can be a very strong pull to do one's own thing (and 
as you pointed out, this is volunteer-driven development, so you can't 
force someone to hack on something they don't want to).


Of course this all ties back to the prior thread you had started about 
suggestions of how to clean up Avalon, and one of biggies was "remove 
all one-man codebases". I think an alternate, but equivalent way of 
phrasing that would be "get back to the situation where everyone is 
involved with most of the code".

Multiple containers out of Avalon seems to have provoked trouble.. 
perhaps the right direction would be to further define 
component-container interaction, interfaces for container-level 
services, and perhaps a single reference implementation. In reality, 
all that matters is the contracts.

I want to be able to take a SAR and deploy it in Merlin, Phoenix, 
Plexus, Fortress.. wherever.
-pete


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Re: Empowering the Developers

[Peter Donald <pe...@realityforge.org>]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003 09:17 pm, Peter Royal wrote:
> And developers without users are just developers, not a community. Thus
> the symbiosis :)

You forget that developers are users. I have seen some damn fine products that 
had virtually no users but oodles of developer "energy" and community. 
Turbine/Avalon fit into this category at various stages. And I can point to 
projects that had oodles of users BCEL/regexp but have basically died due to 
no developers. The only thing that matters is that there is a development 
community. Users and code quality are side-effects of a healthy community.

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald
*-------------------------------------------*
| "A handful of sand is an anthology of the | 
|            universe." -Albert Einstein    |
*-------------------------------------------*


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Re: Empowering the Developers

[Peter Royal <pr...@apache.org>]

On Tuesday, June 3, 2003, at 03:45  AM, Peter Donald wrote:
> On Sun, 1 Jun 2003 08:33 am, Peter Royal wrote:
>> How about 'symbiotic' rather than synonymous? Since developers are 
>> part
>> of the community, but are not the entire community. It takes the users
>> in conjunction with the developers to form the community.
>
> The users are not actively developing or supporting the product - they 
> are
> users. As soon as they start to take a part in the development they 
> become
> developers and that is the same point at which they can directly 
> influence
> the product. Until then developers are free to ignore them but if they 
> do
> that often enough they are obviously going to loose the users.

Exactly.
And developers without users are just developers, not a community. Thus 
the symbiosis :)
-pete


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Re: Empowering the Developers

[Peter Donald <pe...@realityforge.org>]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003 08:33 am, Peter Royal wrote:
> On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 08:19 PM, Peter Donald wrote:
> > I actually consider "empowering the developers" and "empowering the
> > community"
> > as synonymous. People who are given the ability to effect change are
> > much
> > more likely to contribute and work with the community. The "community"
> > and
> > "developers" are one and the same or at least they should be.
>
> How about 'symbiotic' rather than synonymous? Since developers are part
> of the community, but are not the entire community. It takes the users
> in conjunction with the developers to form the community.

The users are not actively developing or supporting the product - they are 
users. As soon as they start to take a part in the development they become 
developers and that is the same point at which they can directly influence 
the product. Until then developers are free to ignore them but if they do 
that often enough they are obviously going to loose the users.

> Of course this all ties back to the prior thread you had started about
> suggestions of how to clean up Avalon, and one of biggies was "remove
> all one-man codebases". I think an alternate, but equivalent way of
> phrasing that would be "get back to the situation where everyone is
> involved with most of the code".

Either way you phrase it - thats the only way that Avalon will survive. Even 
more people have left Avalon recently and if someone does not do something 
soon then I guess it wont really matter much either way.

-- 
Cheers,

Peter Donald		
Dating a women is like driving in a foreign country. You
don't know what side of the road your on, you can't understand 
the signs and you certainly don't want to ask for directions 
but it usually worth the ride. 



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