Ahoy,
I added a file called NEWS. Here we can record interesting user-visible changes to SLIME in a digest format so that users can learn about new features.
I'm thinking this is worthwhile because it'd take a fair bit of work to fully track the mailing list and ChangeLog these days.
The idea is that each time we release^Wmove the FAIRLY-STABLE tag we can send the current NEWS section to the list and start a new section in the file.
Cheers, Luke
On Apr 28, 2004, at 12:07 PM, Luke Gorrie wrote:
The idea is that each time we release^Wmove the FAIRLY-STABLE tag we can send the current NEWS section to the list and start a new section
Out of curiosity, why does there still seem to be no inclination to release? I just had a good friend of mine doubt whether SLIME was stable enough to use on the basis of it only being available via CVS. Most open source projects would have a tarball up by now; not having one is the exception and will lead people to think that we're in a state such that it's not usable yet.
I know fetching from CVS is easy, but that's not the point here. The fact that there has been no release yet send the wrong message, I think. -- Brian Mastenbrook bmastenb@cs.indiana.edu http://cs.indiana.edu/~bmastenb/
Brian Mastenbrook bmastenb@cs.indiana.edu writes:
I know fetching from CVS is easy, but that's not the point here. The fact that there has been no release yet send the wrong message, I think.
Not that I disagree, but to play devil's advocate development still seems to be changing the code base fairly quickly. While SLIME is certainly useable right now (depending on your definition of useable), the rate of change in the codebase suggests instability.
A minor pet peeve I have about many free software (or open source the non tm version) projects is the 0.x releases that never seem to make it to 1.0 (or just haven't yet). I know that is a feature, not a bug. But I think that the SLIME project is doing something rather courageous by not cutting an early release.
Right now, it feels more like XP. Release early and often. This is the time for user input to iron out the major issues before a real 1.0 release. Of course more people with a sense of adventure to run the CVS version (HEAD, not FAIRLY-STABLE) would be a good thing if you buy the theory that many eye balls make bugs shallow.
That said, SLIME is quite useable. Perhaps it is time to consider what needs to happen before the SLIME maintainers are willing to slap a version 1.0 or at least a version 1.0 RC1 tag onto CVS. Most of the supported Lisps are not fast moving targets. So if the features are there, then its just the nastier bugs that need to be stomped.
While I run Emacs from CVS on Mac OSX, I run the version in Debian/testing on Linux. I would recomend slime.el being functional with the latter version as it is the current "stable" version. The same would apply to XEmacs compatibility. GNU Emacs in CVS is a moving target and it shows. Or at least it introduces even more variables into the equation.
Brian Mastenbrook bmastenb@cs.indiana.edu writes:
Out of curiosity, why does there still seem to be no inclination to release? I just had a good friend of mine doubt whether SLIME was stable enough to use on the basis of it only being available via CVS. Most open source projects would have a tarball up by now; not having one is the exception and will lead people to think that we're in a state such that it's not usable yet.
But we have a tarball :-) http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/cvs_root.tar.gz?tarball=1&cvs...
I know fetching from CVS is easy, but that's not the point here. The fact that there has been no release yet send the wrong message, I think.
Today we received bugreports like "CLISP hangs on startup", "SBCL dies with SIGBUS", "can't set FPU modes". Desn't seem like SLIME is ready for release and making a tarball will not help us getting there.
Helmut.
Helmut Eller e9626484@stud3.tuwien.ac.at writes:
Today we received bugreports like "CLISP hangs on startup", "SBCL dies with SIGBUS", "can't set FPU modes". Desn't seem like SLIME is ready for release and making a tarball will not help us getting there.
I agree. Our current rock&roll development style makes this all pretty easy to handle: "Foo is broken [here's a patch]." "Fixed in CVS now." Much more fun than "That'll be fixed in the next release."
The important thing is to make the best Emacs programming mode known to man in the fastest and most enjoyable way. The rest is secondary.
But thanks Brian for the vote of confidence in the current maturity! However, I think having cautious people avoid SLIME initially is a much lesser evil than having them download it thinking it's more mature than it really is and then curse and swear at it.
BTW, SLIME is the most fun project I've been involved in and I attribute much of this to everyone using the same CVS code. With 31 hackers listed in the ChangeLog we must be doing something right :-)
Cheers, Luke
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Brian Mastenbrook -
David Steuber -
Helmut Eller -
Luke Gorrie