[kepler-dev] Why I can't work: a plea for stability

[Dan Higgins]

Christopher,
    I fully agree with your comments. I am worried that Kepler is way 
too fragile for a project supposedly this near to release. I attribute 
this to 'too many cooks in the kitchen', but that may just be the cost 
of a distributed open-source project. In other words, I don't have a 
good solution for the problem.

Dan

Christopher Brooks wrote:

>I'm not actually upset or anything, but I thought I'd give
>you an outsider's perspective.
>
>I'm one of the worst offenders here, since I know I broke the build
>yesterday which my diva related changes.  I had things working
>in one tree, but was not able to test because of a problem in
>my other tree on another machine.
>
>Basically, I thought on my other tree I had broken something
>and spend several hours tracking down the problem as being that
>some geon actors were removed, but geon.xml was not updated.
>It took more time than necessary because I upgraded Eclipse
>and did a reinstall of ptII and kepler sources so I could 
>be sure.  It also took more time because the error message
>was a NullPointerException and I had not seen this sort
>of error before.
>
>Now, I'm facing problems with Eclipse again?
>I'm seeing errors about cipres PAUPInfer class?  
>
>It does not build in Eclipse, so I excluded it, and 
>then I had to remove some files from actors
>and then trash ~/.kepler and run ant buildkarlib
>
>I eventually did all that stuff and now I was able to work.
>
>
>A couple of comments:
>1) We all, (me especially) need to be more careful about not breaking
>the build and Kepler in general
>
>2) Kepler needs to be restructured so that it does not require the
>entire library to be present and working at startup.  Ptolemy II does
>this so as to avoid problems like PAUPInfer.  I don't know what this
>class does, and since I'm not using it, I shouldn't care.  This would
>help start up time.  I think that this might possibly be worth
>considering implementing before 1.0.
>
>3) The Eclipse instructions are very complex.  We were never able to
>help Sivagowri Swaminathan <sivagowri at hotmail.com> to his or my
>satisfaction.  BTW - Under Eclipse 3.2.0 (rc1), with java 1.5.0_06,
>the svg icons are not visible for me?  Not sure why.
>
>4) The limitation about being able to run only one Kepler because
>of the database is troubling.  I'm running on a shared Windows
>server.  If I wanted to use Kepler in a class and have students
>run on this server, would I be able to?
>
>Anyway, those are some random thoughts.  As I said, I'm not
>at all upset about these issues, and I really enjoy contributing
>and collaborating with you all.  I think Kepler is pretty slick,
>I like what you've done with Ptolemy and appreciate you putting
>up with Ptolemy's (and my) ideosyncracies.
>
>_Christopher
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>  
>


-- 
*******************************************************************
Dan Higgins                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-893-5127
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Marine Science Building - Room 3405
Santa Barbara, CA 93195
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