Re: Survey for preparing FreeMarker development effort

Sunday, March 10, 2013, 4:28:45 PM, Raymond Auge wrote:

> Hello Daniel,
>
> Thanks for this. The effort is greatly appreciated ... not that in
> our case we have any immiently pending issues to resolve. Things
> pretty much just work for us and have for a long time.
>
> However, I will make it known within our own community that you are
> proposing this effort and see if I can drum up any particular set of
> needs or wishes to present them here.

Thank you for that!

BTW, one of the things that bugs me is that I don't know much the
FreeMarker integration of the important frameworks. Occasionally, I
see some fragments of FM in some of them, and it's usually pretty bad.
(No, I'm not talking about Liferay here, I don't know it.) They
mis-use features, don't know about features and use ugly hacks
instead, or just never truly finished the integration (i.e., you can
access some framework services from JSP, but they have forgotten to
also expose it to FreeMarker). And at the end FM is only as good as
its integration is. So, although I don't think I will have time for
this during this planned effort, an important way of improving FM
would be reviewing it's integration in other framework, and do
contributions where necessary.

> Also, if at any time you feel that the maintenance of FreeMarker is
> threatened by lack of support, or your own ability/desire (work,
> life, etc.), please let use know as there may be occasion to help with that.

The project is threatened by its bus factor before anything else. The
hassles of signing the CLA doesn't help either. So one of the goals of
this effort will be moving the project to some OS "house", like, I
don't know, Codehaous. That was just an random example, I haven't
looked into this yet. Now, I'm a programmer and not really a
politician (although I'm more "PC" then Jonathan is ;) ), if anybody
has insights, experiences, so on, I'm all ears.

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel Dekany


> Sincerely,
> - Ray
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 10, 2013 at 9:06 AM, Daniel Dekany <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> While I'm not one of the original authors of the 2.x.x (non-classic)
> line, seems I have gradually become the main maintainer of the
> FreeMarker template engine over the last few years or so, as the
> original authors (I mostly mean Jonathan and Attila) are inactive
> around here. Only I couldn't allocate enough time for this either, and
> this starts to become a problem for FreeMarker.
>
> So, to catch up, I plan to allocate serious amount of time [*] for
> FreeMarker development stating from late spring or early summer. The
> goal of this effort is fixing long-standing issues (mostly design
> issues that can be addressed without breaking backward compatibility
> too much), adding frequently requested missing features (an those that
> people don't request but I know they need it...   ), increasing
> usability (better error messages, better documentation, terminology
> simplification) and to make FreeMarker more accessible for potential
> contributors (fixing the branching mess, switching to Maven, Git,
> modularization, addressing ownership/licensing and CLA issues).
>
> Thus, as the first step, I would like to hear about what the wishes of
> you as FreeMarker user are. What features you crave for the most, how
> could FreeMarker integrate better with your product, what are the
> things you or your fellow developers most often has problems with,
> etc. (Of course, I do have a long list of things to fix/improve, but I
> don't want to influence the discussion at this point.)
>
> *: How much time, you might ask. I'm thinking of a few hundred hours
>    here. Yeah, that's bold. What life will allow (work, family, etc.),
>    is another question. We will see.
>
> --
> Thanks,
>  Daniel Dekany


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