Mark Lundquist wrote:
On Jun 6, 2005, at 11:44 AM, Ralph Goers wrote:
We have a project that needs to use a forms framework that is more
advanced than what SimpleForms provides. However, it is difficult on
selling cforms simply because they are marked unstable. What is it
going to take to mark it stable in 2.1.8? Can we simply identify the
known bugs in bugzilla and mark it stable?
I don't know what's going on with your group, but the problem may be
that we define "unstable" = "API subject to change", but the word
"unstable" has other connotations, e.g. "broken", "alpha", "not ready
for prime-time" (also "prone to undergo a spontaneous nuclear decay
reaction" :-).
Why don't we just
1) take everything currently marked "stable", and re-badge those as
"frozen";
2) take forms, and anything else like it, and mark it as "stable"!
I.e., redefine "stable" to mean what average people think it means.
(half-joking,)
—ml—
:-)
The current situation is that the implementation (runs in many projects) and the
community (large developer and user community) are stable, but the interfaces
are *not*. I tried to express this with the hypothetical block descriptor fragment:
<state
community="stable"
interfaces="unstable"
implementation="stable"/>
I don't want to mark Cocoon Forms as stable if we *know now* that the interfaces
will change. Marking Cocoon Forms as stable would require us to support them and
we would create a lot of confusion in the future (e.g. the different Form APIs
which are confusing enough now).
In other words, my +1 depends on a rewritten Flowscript API and repeater
binding. As long as nobody does the actual work we will have to live with an
"unstable" Cocoon Forms block. (though, if the majority of the Cocoon committers
wants to mark it as stable *now* I won't/can't stop it but expect my -1 to
express my concerns and a lot of "I've told you so" in the future ;-) )
--
Reinhard Pötz Independent Consultant, Trainer & (IT)-Coach
{Software Engineering, Open Source, Web Applications, Apache Cocoon}
web(log): http://www.poetz.cc
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