Re: Merging with XWiki and WikiModel

> Hi there,
>
> On Jan 31, 2009, at 12:04 AM, Vincent Siveton wrote:
> > Hi Jason,
> >
> > 2009/1/29 Jason van Zyl <jason@...>:
> >> Howdy,
> >>
> >> I've been looking at reporting in Maven 3.x and I've been following
> >> the work
> >> that Vincent Massol has been doing over at XWiki where he has made
> >> some
> >> attempts at melding Doxia, the XWiki rendering engine, and
> >> WikiModel. You
> >> can see the proposal here:
> >>
> >> http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Design/RenderingEngineConvergence
> >>
> >> I am looking to remove the Doxia dependency from Maven 3.x so that
> >> reporting
> >> is removed from core and just becomes another set of components.
> >> Having
> >
> > I definitely agree to decouple Maven from Doxia, or conversely :)
> > We actually have a lot of problems due to this coupling, see MNG-3402.
> >
> >> Doxia coupled to Maven is not very nice so in the next couple
> >> releases of
> >> the Maven 3.x alphas the hard dependency on Doxia will be removed.
> >> This will
> >> open the door for anyone who wants to add a different mechanism.
> >> Doxia
> >> reports will still work, I'm not planning on removing the
> >> functionality just
> >> unbinding it from the core. But that opens the door for something
> >> new!
> >
> > Some questions to clarify what you have in mind:
> > - how do you plan to integrate reporting concretely to Maven 3?
> > - what about the backward compatibility in the reporting plugins?
> >
> >> What I personally think the best path would be is to help what
> >> Vincent has
> >> started. There are really only three people here who work on Doxia,
> >> the
> >> releases are very slow in coming and I think you would immediately
> >> double or
> >
> > Agree but we work when we have time :)
> > @Dennis: what are your availabilities to release the version 1.0?
> > After this release, 1.1 could be out, IMHO all stuffs are there.
> >
> >> triple the size of the team merging with the XWiki folks and
> >> getting the
> >> WikiModel developer as well. This is what the XWiki folks do all
> >> the time
> >> and I think you would get some more velocity in the progress of the
> >> project
> >> as a whole. Vincent is using Plexus for his stuff so it's not that
> >> wildly
> >> different but I think you would get more visibility over there and
> >> a higher
> >
> > The xwiki proposal seems to move the Doxia code to the xwiki umbrella,
> > so do you plan to do it?
> >
> > @Vincent, could you clarify why a fork is not possible for you?
>
> Let me explain the point of view of the xwiki community (I hope I'm
> summarizing it well here):
>
> * XWiki is not a wiki. It's a platform offering wiki components to
> develop any type of content-centric web application based on the wiki
> paradigm.
>
> * We've started reorganizing ourselves to implement this vision back
> in 2007. We've started by decoupling our monolithic code into modules
> and components (using Plexus).
>
> * We're not finding that there are some important pieces that we want
> to make top level projects, independent of the other xwiki modules/
> components. For the moment we have identified 2 pieces:
>    - the rendering engine
>    - our brand new GWT-based WYSIWYG editor
>
> * We could propose these under new projects at the ASF for example.
> These are the reasons preventing us from doing so right now:
>    - we'd like to promote the XWiki project name as the place where to
> get wiki "components". If we start splitting the rendering engine or
> the wysiwyg editor we won't achieve this
>    - having to implement and support several projects (the xwiki one +
> the engine one at ASF + the wysiwyg one wherever else
> (@code.google.org for ex)) is going to spread our committer base thin
> achieving the opposite as what we want to achieve which is making all
> people interested on working on wiki "components" together.
>    - we have a very good infrastructure team and we completely host
> all our tools. We like it this way since it's real fast and it works
> real well and we can only complain to ourselves if something is not
> right and we can fix it right away. Note that the infra is paid by
> XWiki SAS (a company offering services on top of the xwiki oss project
> - See http://tinyurl.com/7c488p for more details)
> - basically we can work faster if the code is on the xwiki svn
>
> It's possible that one day we'll propose the whole project to the ASF
> but I don't think we're ready for that yet. For the moment we like it
> the way we are able to progress fast and we don't feel the need.
>
> Note that xwiki projects are currently under the LGPL but we can
> discuss making the new rendering engine (which would be the merge
> between doxia, xwiki and wikimodel ) under the ASL if you feel this is
> better.
>
> Now why are we interested in merging them all? Actually that wasn't
> our idea. It was Jason's. We were fine developing and progressing fast
> on our own xwiki rendering engine. But at the same time it's true that
> I've realized it was a pity that XWiki/WikiModel and Doxia are re-
> developing the same things instead of collaborating and working on
> building something together. So I see 2 win-win advantages for us all:
> - for Doxia this can be a way to make it live on and be active again,
> with even more features and better support
> - for XWiki we would love to get some new committers on board to help
> us with the rendering engine (we currently have about 3 committers
> active on it either full time or part time). In addition the merge
> between these 3 engines (xwiki/wikimodel/doxia) would create a new
> rendering engine that could easily be the best rendering engine on the
> web. For us one advantage would be to spread the xwiki name even more
> and thus get more contributors and users of the xwiki "components" and
> applications.
>
> Last, while I see it very interesting to everyone to perform this
> merge, I can understand if some people would prefer to continue
> working on what they do on their side without merging. That's fine and
> I'm not going to fight for doing the merge at all cost. Especially
> since doing the merge is going to be costly for us in term of time/
> effort. For it to be worthwhile we must all agree to it and like the
> idea.
>
> So what happens if the merge isn't done? On the xwiki side we'll
> continue to improve our rendering engine fast (we're progressing very
> fast right now since we have very active committers and since the
> rendering is actively used in all the xwiki applications this will
> continue). Even though we have a Doxia bridge we're not using it for
> different reasons but one of them is that the Doxia parsers we've
> tried were not good enough. I remember trying the confluence one and
> it was very buggy. So I was just waiting for the need to use the
> confluence parser to arise before rewriting it using wikimodel (it's a
> one day job at max to get a very strong parser, thanks to wikimodel
> tools).
>
> Merging has its share or work required on both sides but it's the best
> option in the end IMO. Now it's for you to decide if this has enough
> interest for Doxia.
>
> Cheers,
> -Vincent
>
> PS: If you want to see how the xwiki project is managed read
> http://tinyurl.com/7c488p and go to http://dev.xwiki.org which contains all
> our dev practices
>
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Vincent
> >
> >> degree of collaboration. I think you would also get a model that is
> >> more
> >> complete for things like blogs, wikis, and books.
> >>
> >> Any thoughts? I've CC'd Vincent too as I'm not sure he's on this
> >> list.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Jason