Tom et al., although I can't really disagree with your complaints
about the AOLserver 4.5 development, communication, etc., I think you
may be overreacting a bit. So, they committed some likely ill-thought
out code, and then eventually released it before it was ready, all
without nearly enough communication and review. Bad, yes, but it does
happen, and shouldn't be an insurmountable problem - just an obnoxious
one.
Also, it's not like us other folks in the AOLserver community jumped
all over the problem first thing! E.g., I'm still using 4.0.10,
haven't touched it in ages, and have barely looked at the 4.5 code,
even though it was released back in June 2006, more than a
year ago!
Btw, Tom, thanks for discovering and really digging into these 4.5
problems.
I also wonder how much of the premature 4.5 release was driven or
abetted by internal turmoil at AOL, which the AOL guys never talk
about publically on the AOLserver list. It sounds to me as if most of
the AOLserver developers - including
Jim Davidson
- are now employed at other companies doing other things, and the few
that remain at AOL are probably no longer working directly on
AOLserver related projects at all. I think an AOL employee alluded to
this recently on the list by saying something like, "If it wasn't for
the [open source] community, AOLserver would have been dead two years
ago."
Also, Tom, re. your "I'm sure there is nothing we can do about it."
comment - that seems too negative to me! There is certainly something
we could do about it - we could "simply" invest the time to
figure out and commit changes to the code! (We could; I'm
not saying we should have to, and the wasted effort in straightening
out someone else's broken new code when the old was perfectly good is
always annoying.) There are many non-AOL folks who have CVS commit
access to AOLserver on SourceForege, note, even if hardly any of them
ever use it.
