building the geronimo platform out a hodge-podge of other open source components

[Sanjiva Weerawarana <sa...@opensource.lk>]

Hi Guys,

This is a bit off from the usual discussions on this list .. ;-).

I'm involved with some discussions on how open source projects
manage to aggregate other components into larger components/products.
Clearly Geronimo is a good example of a system that puts together
a whole lotta other stuff.

Any thoughts on the following questions would be most welcome!

- How often has Geronimo's integration of a component (say OpenEJB)
  required modifications to that component?
    - When such mods are required how easy/hard has it been to get
      that community to make and own the mods?
    - How often do you have to maintain patches against other 
      components?

- On the daily build cycles, how often do builds break because one
  of the components made some incompatible change which breaks the
  integration (of "glue" code ;-)) that Geronimo includes to bring
  that component in?

- What role does Gump (does Geronimo use Gump?) play in helping 
  detect problems quickly?
    - (The reason for this question is to understand whether the usual
       approach of taking a snapshot and integrating is severely 
       problemetical or not a big problem.)

Anything else you think would help understand how a puzzle like
Geronimo comes together would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Sanjiva.