Salesforce wsc hacking: yet another Open Source encounter?

As I wrote in an earlier post I’ve volunteered to become a committer to the wsc tool and are in the progress of making minor tweaks and enhancements for a coming release 23.

My plan was that this release should be no more than a “maintenance” release covering most of the relevant issues. And I do have a number of ideas for major changes for a possible release 24, e.g.:

  • Fixing issue 51 – or at least provide a usable implementation hopefully inspired by input from Martin Haynes
  • Reworking/reimplementing the wsdlc tool and templating mechanism
  • Reworking infrastructure parts, possibly using JAXB/JAX-WS
  • Mavenize the build, divide build tools and infrastructure, 2 perhaps 3 artifacts
  • Adding unit tests

I stopped further developments on the “23 branch” when I realized that there apparently already was a “fork” on github.

Salesforce documentation points to mvnrepository which points to github. Unfortunately the link to github is dead. And so far I have not been able to determine where the source for this is, who maintains it and if it is actually a fork.

Then on Feb 4th 2013 Victor Itkin comments on issue 53 (related to the build tool, an area where I’m already working on a couple of ideas) that he has already made a fork. Also that he have merged “the changes introduced in 23”.

But, release 23 has not been released yet, it is still work in progress, and Victor would know if he’d read the comments made by me on the same issue on Feb 1st.

Now it appears there could potentially be at least 3 different versions of the tool, the original on sfdc-wsc and 2 forks.

I’m not interested in maintaining yet-another-fork nor do I like to contribute to other developers forks without being asked.

So I wrote Victor an email:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: sfdc-wsc-maven fork
From: Jesper Udby <jesperudby@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2013 08:54:36 +0100
To: Victor Itkin <victor.i...@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi Victor.
 
I notice you have created a fork of the wsc tool (
http://code.google.com/p/sfdc-wsc/) at
http://code.google.com/p/sfdc-wsc-maven/
 
Could you please enlighten me with some background information? I've tried
to dig out information about the current status of the tool - while
considering to be an active committer - to no avail.
 
I assume you have some perfectly good reasons to fork instead of trying to
contribute to the current tool?
 
You do know that there already exists a "maven build" of the tool that is
actually linked to by Salesforce (although the link to the *source *seems
dead)?
 
You do know that the merge you have done with the code I have committed on
path wsc23 is "work in progress"?
 
You didn't bother asking me if I was okay with that, even if my google mail
address is available on the site?
 
Are you ready to continue support and maintenance of your own fork? Btw,
don't expect me to continue to contribute to your fork...
 
Thanks
 
Jesper Udby
 
PS: Expect me to blog about my experiences regarding being an open-source
contributor in general and the wsc tool in particular.

Updated 2013-02-06: Victor has returned my email with a rather lengthy message I’m not going to repeat here.

I’ve also got some rather interesting response from an unnamed Salesforce architect which confuses things even more. More blogging…

Thank you to Victor for being upright and give me a thorough explanation of the background for his fork! And more information about the strange “maven port” on mvnrepository – who is maintaining that?…

About Jesper Udby

I'm a freelance computer Geek living in Denmark with my wife and 3 kids. I've done professional software development since 1994 and JAVA development since 1998.
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