[Tm4j-developers] Forking a new development branch (anticipating TM4J 2.0)

[<xua...@ba...>]

Hello,

the current TM4J is becoming increasingly outdated. Much work needs to
be done:

   1. support the current TMDM (
      http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-model/2006-06-18/ )
   2. support the current XTM 2.0 (
      http://www.isotopicmaps.org/sam/sam-xtm/2006-06-19/ )
   3. support Java 1.5 style (at least, Java 1.6 is already released now)=


To do this, significant changes are necessary, which probably are not
backwards compatible. As I do not expect every old TM4J-application to
be adapted, I suggest opening a new development branch. The old branch
can be advanced to a version 1.0 (probably without the above features),
but the new branch should result in a TM4J 2.0 with the above features.
I think that it is possible to keep a TM4J 2.0 binary compatible and
source compatible (albeit with compiler warnings) with TM4J
0.9.8-applicatons, however, for my part of development, compatibility
would not be a major concern.

For me, there seem to be 3 options:

   1. Change the current TM4J CVS version to include these features.
   2. Fork a new branch of the current TM4J CVS version within the
      current CVS repository to include these features in this new branch=
=2E
   3. Fork a new branch of the current TM4J CVS version outside of the
      current CVS repository to include these features in this new branch=
=2E

I really do not like option 3 (as this would decrease the already low
(at least quiet) userbase and the probability of other people
cooperatively improving on it as well). However, for option 1 or 2, I
need your approval.

What do you think?

ciao,
Xu=E2n.




P.S.: About one year ago, I asked this:

Xu=E2n Baldauf wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'd like to create a project which uses tm4j (and ozone). However,
> tm4j is still not converted to use Java 1.5 generics (see
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5/pdf/generics-tutorial.pdf ). Thus, I'd
> like to change tm4j to use Java 1.5 generics. However, after this
> conversion, using a generics-capable Java compiler (Java 1.5 javac or
> special Java 1.4 javac) is required to compile the changed tm4j.
>
> Would the current tm4j community accept such changes to the
> development tree of tm4j? (If not, I would not put work into doing
> these changes.)
>
> Regards,
>
> Xu=E2n Baldauf.
>