That said, however, I don't see the need to be hostile to people who might have a different itch to scratch, especially if they're not already dedicating large amounts of their personal life to active OpenACS toolkit coding already.
Well, John's initial posts were along the line of rewriting the toolkit to eliminate dependencies on AOLserver. Integrating such work into our mainstream releases would impact the project and require resource from folks like me (responsible for making those releases work), Simon (responsible for making sure they're tested), etc.
There's a serious possibility that performance under AOLserver might be negatively impacted.
If the community supports repackaging for other platforms there's going to be consumption of resource there, too, along with documentation needs.
Note that we're not doing a bang-up job in the above areas as it is.
If John were simply announcing that he intends to scratch his itch for his own pleasure I wouldn't object in the least. I'm not objecting to your doing the same, right?
But John's first post made it clear that he was suggesting a new direction for the community to take (rewrite OpenACS to remove AOLserver dependencies), not simply that he intends to pursue a personal project for personal pleasure.
That's a very different thing. If we were to take that path, it would require our resources as well as his. You're not asking for our resources. See the difference?
For this reason I'm far more interested in mod_nsd as a potential "solution" (this presumes a problem exists but for the sake of argument I'll accept that one does). This wouldn't require rewriting of the toolkit therefore wouldn't impact us. My attitude towards such a project would be simple: you're on your own. I'd suggest we host it here but folks working on it would be responsible for their own hacking, documentation, testing and packaging and I would fiercely fight to keep existing OpenACS resources involved in working on OpenACS issues instead.
Because there are still so damned many of them ...
