Important points:
- my original posting has nothing to do with my opinion of the dotLRN
governance issue, which I was waiting to resolve with Al before publicy
discussing.
- Don, if you have no issues to point out, then I have no answer to provide.
If you have some "rationalizations" in mind, then I'm sure you know what
issues these were supposedly refering to (I sure don't). The only reason I
brought this up publicly is because you've been bringing it up privately,
causing divisiveness privately, and refusing to hear my technical opinion
privately.
Now, I'd like to address Dave's points which are clear and which are very
helpful to my understanding of the situation.
- new-portal. OpenForce has always developed this to be OpenACS-
dependent and not dotLRN-dependent. I never advocated that new-
portal should be dotLRN-dependent. One of my private emails was grossly
misquoted on the issue, which understandably led to this misunderstanding.
What I advocated was the idea that new-portal shouldn't be distributed with
the base OpenACS tarball and stuffed down every developer's throat,
because I believe that is serious bloat. I suggested distributing it separately,
as an independent package. I went back on this decision after I realized that,
given current OpenACS architecture, this would make people's life more
complicated, not less. That said, I'm still very worried about OpenACS bloat.
- new Tcl procs: we cleaned up a lot of the Tcl API but we never
deprecated old procs, we made sure they were always functional. We tried to
give as much help as possible to point this out, but we probably didn't do
enough. We'll work more towards that, this makes a lot of sense.
- documentation: yes, we have not documented as much as we should
have. It's very difficult under client deadlines to do so. That said, we've
provided as much person-to-person help as possible. We've offered our help
to MuseaTech, Furfly, and Collaboraid in case they hit any snags. We'll work
harder on this, this point also makes sense.
- generally increased communication: we'll work harder on that, too. I think
this is a general problem that we all have, apart from the few courageous
documentation gurus like Roberto and Vinod, without whom we would have
code and no docs.
Dave: your comments are not at all interpreted as an attack. On the contrary, I
find them helpful. It's helped me identify one massive miscommunication
(new-portal), and a few points where we should do a better job (generally
communication and documentation).