The
hornget website is a tangible landmark in
horn’s journey from fun project to something of actual potential and use. It has been met with a predictable, muted response for something I genuinely believed was lacking in the .NET space. Horn is in OSS terms, very much an itch that needed scratching. One only has to look at the figures at the end of the post and the lack of publicity surrounding what could and should be a worthwhile community initiative for .NET OSS. It is easy for me to overstate the need for
horn as I have been its most vigorous and active member since its inception. We now have a windows service that not only builds many of the favourite .NET OSS offerings but also sets out to resolve the dependency maze that is so intricately mapped out by the various rogue library versions that are now interspersed among the many lib folders of .NET OSS.
We have provided this and a DSL dialect for specifying the build and dependency instructions. As is usual with defined and set goals, we have over reached our initial expectations. This is very much a time to stop and review where we are and why this does not seem to be an interesting subject for .NET. I have been on a ruby on rails course this week and the use of ruby gems has obviously had a resonance with me.
The jury is very much out on whether this was a cause worth championing. I cannot justify my time on this project and I hoped this would be my way of repaying the massive debt to OSS. I am not even sure I learnt anything during the process apart from getting contributors to submit code to your OSS project is damn hard.
I will leave you with the
horn scores on the doors via google analytics.
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