On 11/22/2016 08:33 PM, Ed Merks wrote:
We considered it, yes. Then we considered what it would be
like to spend many months on politics, backwards compatibility
testing, arguing about design points, and so on, and so on,
verses simply spending several weeks implementing something
better that can coexist will without adverse impact on legacy
details. Decisions, decisions..
So if I understand correctly, contributing to PDE would have been
the ideal case technically speaking, but happened to be too
expensive, even for contributors as experienced as you and Eike? I
can for sure understand the argument why not contributing to PDE
first in that case, and I hope the cost of contributing to an
established project such as PDE gets lower.
In the end, the serialization of the .target file is a
direct reflection of the poor implementation (model) of the
ITargetDefinition. You can't simply improve the editor nor can
you implement a good design from the existing serialization. It's
just legacy, and in the end, the old design needs to remain there
for compatibility.
There are strategies used in Platform to extend model/APIs without
breaking existing stuff. It's not an easy problem, but it has
solutions (which aren't easy neither).
Unfortunately, without really understanding it, some
feel free, to characterize, in a
most-humble-of-opinions-sort-of-way-of-course, as one layer of
abstraction too many.
Did you consider looking more closely at all the details before
expressing a most-humble-opinion
There is no need to go into details to understand that there is a
strong duplication of concerns between all those TP formats; and
that multiplying solutions for the same issue in a community such as
ours can become an anti-pattern as it spread resources across
multiple projects and reduce consistency and can even increase the
integration cost (if Tycho wants to support all those format, it
multiplies the effort, whereas if all were in PDE, there would
probably be an API able to consume any of those and integration
would have to be done only once for all those formats.
In the beginning of your answer, you explain why you didn't
contribute it to PDE; and there was no big technical blocker, it was
all about need to find levels of agreement with current project
state and "time to market". So somehow, it seems like yourself do
agree that the TP work in Oomph would make sense to be in PDE, and
that at that point of time, it was/is not something you were willing
to do there - for the sake of productivity.
So at least, I read your mail as an acknowledgment that the TP parts
of Oomph would rather be in PDE, so we somehow agree.
Maybe it would be the right time to consider migrating some pieces
of Oomph to PDE?
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