Restoring original signal/noise ratio

[Stefano Mazzocchi <st...@apache.org>]

Hmmmm,

when the signal/noise ratio drops so much in a few days, I feel like I
need to do something.

I'll keep this short, because I want to go to bed.

1) communication between some Apache XML communities sucks. Noise at
least is better than nothing.

2) everybody agrees Xerces needs refactoring.

3) everybody agrees corporate-racism is a bad thing (tm).

4) everybody agrees the spinnaker announcement was a bad move, the
intentions were good, the diplomatic skills pretty bad.

Now, let me say something:

Internal forks happen when the original development community believes a
refactoring is _not_ needed. Catalina and JServ1.0 were all created at a
side because the dev community was happy with what they had.

But this is _NOT_ so in Cocoon, where the next-generation is called
Cocoon2 because we _know_ it will be it.

So, probably I'm totally stupid, but I heard _everybody_ saying that a
Xerces refactoring is needed. Everybody.

So, why shouldn't we call it Xerces2?

Catalina is an experiment because there is disagreement (maybe there is
no more disagreement today, since Craig is positive calling it Tomcat
4.0).

Why should we make experiments when we all agree? Why should we do
mind-tricks with users with codenames.

BTW, the jakarta people got it a little too far with "Apache Jakarta
Tomcat Catalina". C'mon, all nice names, but this is getting a little
out of control.

So, my opinion: let's keep things simple.

Cocoon is moving to Cocoon2
Xalan is moving to Xalan2
Fop is moving to Fop1 for the latest spec (they are still on the 0.xx
range)

Why Xerces should go XRI? Are we going to have _more_ than one
refactoring? 

C'mon.

James proposed an internal forking because was unaware of the
refactoring concerns of the Xerces team.

But now that everybody agrees such a thing is needed and would benefit
everybody, why bother?

Some say: it may not be good enough to become Xerces2. Really? Did
something like this stopped us in the past? if it's not good enough
we'll do Xerces3 and 4 and 20 if necessary.

C'mon, people, it's time to get things done.

Do you want a new parser to help out? great, we have it, it will be the
experience of the Xerces team, the new ideas from the Crimson team, and
lots of help from the Apache XML community and other projects.

Xerces is the name of the Apache XML parser.

And Xerces should remain.

Then, if the outcome is not good enough, we won't release it and
refactor it again, keeping it on the CVS until we are happy with it
(like we are doing for Cocoon2).

I don't plan to partecipate in this refactoring effort (I already have
enough things to do), so take this with a grain of salt.

my very sleepy 0.02 euros...

-- 
Stefano Mazzocchi      One must still have chaos in oneself to be
                          able to give birth to a dancing star.
<st...@apache.org>                             Friedrich Nietzsche
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