[macker-developer] Continued Macker development and Macker 0.5

[Barre D. <bar...@us...>]

Since last week the development on Macker has been picked up again,
accompanied with new developers.
Through this mail I would like to indicate that the Macker project
from this point on will again be actively maintained and expanded.

* The Team
Paul Cantrell has created an excellent tool called Macker and but has,
unfortunately, not been able to spent much time on it lately; in
response I have offered to continue Macker development on sourceforge
which Paul has agreed to.
Jasper de Vries also joined the macker project as a commiter.

* Macker 0.4
Currently Macker is written with Java 1.4 and Ant as target platforms,
supported with the codehaus project macker-maven-plugin by Wayne Fay.
The plan is to keep the 0.4 version of Macker on the same target
platform and only provide major bugfixes on the release.

* Macker 0.5
In the meanwhile a 0.5 version of Macker will be worked on with a few
things planned so far:
- moving to a more plugable design for connectors, possibly
integrating the codehaus macker-maven-plugin project into the core
release
- full support for Java 1.5 and 1.6
- review on the external API and accompanying documentation so
plug-in/connector development is simplified where needed

* Macker 0.5 and backwards compatibility
No major configuration changes are planned for 0.5 to maintain full
backwards compatibility (in terms of configuration).
There also aren't any major functional changes planned besides the
ones mentioned above. This doesn't mean that no new functionality will
 be included in 0.5; please post a feature request in the tracker or
one of the mailing-lists so it can be considered for the next release.
Patches/diffs with the functionality implemented are more then welcome
as well. ;-)
Due to the potential impact of the changes on the API, we're not
maintaining backwards compatibility on the contracts of public
classes.

* Website
Since innig.net is the personal website for Paul Cantrell, the Macker
website will, in time, move to macker.sourceforge.net.
I will post to both the developer and user mailing-lists when there is
a concrete date set for the move.
As a sidenote, the package naming will not reflect these changes and
will stay net.innig.macker.*.


With kinds regards,

Barre Dijkstra
bar...@us...