On 03 Oct 2005, at 16:29, Jorg Heymans wrote:

IMHO, eye candy, blocks-I'll-commit-rather-than-shepherd-myself and featuritis without proper consideration and restraint is what is "killing Cocoon". Much of this could be tackled by divorcing the core from the (figuratively speaking) crap, hard and fast. The good stuff will remain, the not-so-supported stuff will fall apart and fade into dust.

Now, in an environment where every committer/consultant worries about his own private customers and their JDK version numbers, I wonder if and when this will ever take off. In an environment where consultants expect the project to care for the fact they try to make money on the project, reality becomes warped.

If more people would have build products on top of Cocoon rather than do projects, I'm sure we might have been somewhere already. Now, Cocoon is that much of a moving and intangible target that, as an application developer, one really has a hard time justifying a pro-choice, except if one knows Cocoon (i.e. its good bits) really, really well. And then he won't use Cocoon as a product or platform, but rather as a bag of code he feels comfortable with.

More bait: my first reply contained quotes as "leadership, ESR, Suicidalism, being too kind for one another". Or as my SO would typify: "Do you want an apple or a pear?" "Can I have both? I don't want to choose, let alone make someone unhappy." "Duh!"

I'll be in Amsterdam tomorrow evening, ready to catch some flack. As always, my style idiom is targeted towards apologistic behaviour afterwards, and with the very best intentions. And I believe this kind of mails will be sent to the Spring and Rails-lists in about a year or so as well.

I'll finish in Baz Luhrmann-style:

Do one thing, and do it really well. Focus, and don't look back to be satisfied with what you done, but try hard to become better than you already think you are.

:-)