I am getting more than a little nervous about the future of Embperl. I've written to the list before about this, but I didn't get anything more than "it's ok, don't worry" from Gerald. But then, it was back to usual - relative lack of responsiveness on his part, no new bugfixes for the beta... I appreciate greatly his contribution of Embperl to the open source community, believe me, and I use the package extensively in my work - which is exactly why I am getting so nervous. There has been a long period of apparently no progress on 2.0, and increasingly Gerald seems to be absent from this list. I understand he must be very busy on his own business (that's always the standard assumption), but given my own code investment, I would appreciate an honest appraisal of where we are. Do I need to start looking elsewhere? Anyone got any clues? I wrote Gerald privately almost two weeks ago, and have still received no reply. Is he on vacation? Why not mention this to the list?
If it came down to Gerald no longer having the time to develop the project, then should we try to take it on ourselves? I don't even know the protocol or etiquette for doing that. I mean, it's Gerald's thing, his totally, and I don't want for a second to take it away or even try to fork the project without his blessing. I'm not even at all certain that I *could* take it on. To be honest, I haven't even had time to delve into the code - there's a large amount of it. I am experienced in C++, more so than Perl in fact. Any thoughts from other longtime users? Can we help Gerald? I suggested exactly this in my last private email to him (sent couple weeks ago, no reply). So here I am not so much trying to bipass Gerald, as just taking the next step to see what others think. If I am totally out of line then please tell me and I'll shut up. But if anyone else has the same fears as me, then it would at least be reassuring to know that I'm not alone. I'm very willing to let Gerald take his time on this stuff if that's all he needs, but this is just something that's been niggling at the back of my head for a while now and I wanted to get it out in the open. Let me stress again that I am very supportive of Gerald and would like to make this work - I even offered to try and have a go at writing an (English) book on Embperl, perhaps some sort of cookbook format. I am pretty busy with my own stuff, and have quite enough on my plate developing application-level stuff, but if it was clear that this would be welcomed by both Gerald and the community then it might be worth spending the time on. Even if it wasn't picked up by a real publisher, it might be useful as an online book. Also, obviously, development, if feasible - but I have the feeling that there are *much* more capable developers on this list than me. Believe me, I want to see Embperl develop and succeed. But the list traffic is way down, and there haven't been any real progress on the 2.0 beta in so long... Anyone got any advice on this "elephant in the room"? TIA /Neil --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
