Forrest’s history
As I was going through the Forrest home page, I came across this interesting trivia which somehow I hadn’t noticed before:
From [[http://forrest.apache.org/#History|Forrest's history]]
> Apache Forrest was started in January 2002, with the major use-case being to create a consistent and efficient xml.apache.org group of project websites with a uniform, lightweight, easy-to-navigate layout and structure. In addition, Forrest was to be a Sourceforge-like project management tool, complementing Apache Gump (hence the name ‘Forrest’).
Just good to know.
It’s good you spotted this. We have, over the years, completely lost this particular focus. However, many of the components are actually in place for this, for example:
- change management
- project categorisation and description
- charting
- documentation integration
Apache would still benefit a great deal from Forrest bringing all these component together in a cohesive unit. It’s already being used in a couple of Apache federations (i.e. XML and incubator) but we have so far failed to gather enough assistence from those communities in realising the across project reporting and integration.