A BCEL future? Was: [POLL] Committer attendence

[Henri Yandell <fl...@gmail.com>]

> Niclas Hedhman wrote:
> > Hi,
> > How many committers subscribe to this list?
> > 
> > [ ] I am a committer.
> > [ ] I am not a committer.

I'm on all Jakarta dev lists :)

Quick bit of cvs analysis.

BCEL has 6 committers at the moment. 3 are on the Jakarta PMC, but
Markus Dahm and Enver Haase seem to be the main committers by a long
way and are not; Markus has committed a couple of fixes last month,
but that's it for 2004. Last website deploy was in 2003.

372 java files, depends on jakarta-regexp, though only for one class.
Otherwise it's nicely stand-alone. My vague understanding of BCEL is
that ObjectWeb's ASM is in more use nowadays, but vague is the correct
term for me there :)

To contradict Niclas, all Jakarta committers don't have access to all
of Jakarta. It's delineated on sub-project basis, with only
Commons-sandbox as far as I know being open (and even there you have
to request access).

36 bugs in bugzilla since March 2003, so definitely work to be done,
with Cocoon being a user.

Some ideas:

* Wait for Markus and Enver to wake up, and see how we can help them.
* Someone find time to apply patches and consider bugs. Always hard to
do and yet still maintain a good sense of where the codebase is I
think. But at least it lets the community keep things moving.
* Move into Commons. I think it's probably too big, but I feel the
Commons community is good at such things and the scope of BCEL doesn't
seem that huge I might be underestimating it).
* Move to another Apache/Jakarta project. Seems unnecessary unless it
turns out that only Cocoon, say, uses BCEL.

I think no one will argue that if there are contributors with patches
waiting to be applied, we need committers to apply patches, to be
holders of the apache way and to guide contributors into committing
etc, the only question seems (to me) to be who those committers will
be.

Ideas?

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Re: A BCEL future? Was: [POLL] Committer attendence

[Niclas Hedhman <ni...@hedhman.org>]

On Tuesday 14 December 2004 11:35, Henri Yandell wrote:

> To contradict Niclas, all Jakarta committers don't have access to all
> of Jakarta. It's delineated on sub-project basis, with only
> Commons-sandbox as far as I know being open (and even there you have
> to request access).

I stand corrected. There is a single Unix "jakarta" group, and I forgot about 
the CVSROOT/avail system... :o(

Cheers
Niclas
-- 
   +------//-------------------+
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 / http://niclas.hedhman.org / 
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Re: A BCEL future? Was: [POLL] Committer attendence

[Adrian Sutton <ad...@intencha.com>]

> Or a response from a BCEL developer to indicate what BCEL offers that
> ASM lacks would be useful...

Going the other way, I found BCEL had a massive lack of documentation 
that prevented me from using it.  ASM wasn't good either but it was 
definitely much easier to work out.  There are chunks of BCEL that 
don't even seem to have JavaDoc comments.

I'd have written some docs for it but never managed to get started.

Regards,

Adrian Sutton.
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Re: A BCEL future? Was: [POLL] Committer attendence

[Simon Kitching <s_...@paradise.net.nz>]

On Tue, 2004-12-14 at 16:35, Henri Yandell wrote:

> BCEL has 6 committers at the moment. 3 are on the Jakarta PMC, but
> Markus Dahm and Enver Haase seem to be the main committers by a long
> way and are not; Markus has committed a couple of fixes last month,
> but that's it for 2004. Last website deploy was in 2003.
> 
> 372 java files, depends on jakarta-regexp, though only for one class.
> Otherwise it's nicely stand-alone. My vague understanding of BCEL is
> that ObjectWeb's ASM is in more use nowadays, but vague is the correct
> term for me there :)


I investigated BCEL and ASM when starting work on CLIRR
(clirr.sourceforge.net) about six months ago (clirr currently uses
BCEL). ASM had a fair level of activity around it, while BCEL was *very*
quiet.

> 36 bugs in bugzilla since March 2003, so definitely work to be done,
> with Cocoon being a user.
> 
> Some ideas:
> 
> * Wait for Markus and Enver to wake up, and see how we can help them.
> * Someone find time to apply patches and consider bugs. Always hard to
> do and yet still maintain a good sense of where the codebase is I
> think. But at least it lets the community keep things moving.
> * Move into Commons. I think it's probably too big, but I feel the
> Commons community is good at such things and the scope of BCEL doesn't
> seem that huge I might be underestimating it).
> * Move to another Apache/Jakarta project. Seems unnecessary unless it
> turns out that only Cocoon, say, uses BCEL.

ASM (asm.objectweb.org) is, it would seem to me, smaller, faster,
cleaner and has more active development. And it's under a BSD license. 

ASM seems to simply have found a better approach than BCEL. No criticism
intended to the BCEL developers; ASM is a more recent project that may
well have learnt from earlier projects like BCEL.

It would seem sensible to me for projects to migrate from BCEL to ASM,
and for apache to retire BCEL. Of course it would be nice for one
significant BCEL-using project (eg cocoon) to look at whether ASM has
the necessary features before doing so; certainly ASM had all the
features that CLIRR needed but that is a fairly tightly focussed
project.

Or a response from a BCEL developer to indicate what BCEL offers that
ASM lacks would be useful...

Regards,

Simon


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