On Thu, 17 Oct 2002, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Let's take Avi (it would be worthwhile if you could say a few
> words about this yourself) and ask the question why exactly he hasn't
> done his work in the context of 3.3alpha?! For the things that I did,
> the answers are: #1 I need this with serious amounts of stuff working
> within 3.2 and porting (and while porting finding and fixing bugs in the
> module system) is not really an option. #2 It's been too hard to fit
> into specific places of the modules system because you got to understand
> too many of the details.

My answers #1 and #2 are identical to yours.  I would add #3, I never got
the sense from the list that very many people were using 3.3a, and I
subscribe to the usual open source philosophy that there's benefit in
people other than yourself using your tools.

> For a community effort it might just not be a good idea to concentrate
> that many responsibilities in a single place. I think it'd be relatively
> simple to handle all of the problems independently (e.g., source code
> access, class definitions, versioning, packaging, name spaces) and then,
> once the individual parts are there have a brainstorming session about
> who should use what in which context and how they all play together. At
> the very least people could try out individual stuff (which - as your
> and Avi's work show - is useful on its own) before they buy into the
> larger changes. Sure, it may not be as nice of an algebra, but I think
> it'd be much more "real".

I agree 100%.

Avi