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

[Bertram Ludaescher]

Many cooks are not necessarily a problem, if it's a well-oiled (or
buttered?) team. 

Stricter enforcement of certain "cooking rules" can help, but can
create conflicts in a multi-team situation with different "cooking
objectives and goals".

One possible approach: make "smooth extensibility" (adding new actors,
adding new directors, changing GUI components, etc) a top priority!
(and if it's already, then make it an even topper priority ;-)

In this context, I'd like to call this the "Buffet Approach":
(incidently, I just came from our buffet lunch)
Lots of cooks, all doing there own stuff in parallel and concurrently. 
Also, consumers pick what the like and "it all works"..

:-)

Bertram



>>> On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 13:19:43 -0700
>>> Dan Higgins <higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu> wrote: 
DH> 
DH> Christopher,
DH>     I fully agree with your comments. I am worried that Kepler is way 
DH> too fragile for a project supposedly this near to release. I attribute 
DH> this to 'too many cooks in the kitchen', but that may just be the cost 
DH> of a distributed open-source project. In other words, I don't have a 
DH> good solution for the problem.
DH> 
DH> Dan
DH> 
DH> Christopher Brooks wrote:
DH> 
>> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> Kepler-dev mailing list
>> Kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
>> http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/mailman/listinfo/kepler-dev
>> 
>> 
DH> 
DH> 
DH> -- 
DH> *******************************************************************
DH> Dan Higgins                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
DH> http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-893-5127
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