On February 24th 2021, it will be seven (!) years since the last official release of ooRexx took place, believe it or not!
People who do not follow this list or the ooRexx code updates on Sourceforge will think, that maintenance, let alone development, of ooRexx has ceased seven years ago! :( This puts pressure on those people in organisations/businesses who use Rexx/ooRexx but are faced with demands of replacements with more modern, maintained and continuously developed programming languages like Python, Ruby and the like. Also, people who suggest to allow usage of ooRexx in organisations/businesses will usually get turned down as ooRexx is outdated and not maintained, so why using it? Learning about a beta version does not help as everyone knows that beta means error-prone, unstable software and the like, and as a result organisations/businesses usually prohibit usage and deployment of beta software. As ooRexx 5.0 beta has been in an excellent condition for many years, it could have been released years ago! ooRexx 5.0 beta adds a wealth of great new features, in addition very notable speed improvements and fixes many bugs of the seven years old ooRexx 4.2, the last official release of ooRexx! As no show-stoppers are present I think that the current version of ooRexx 5.0 beta should be released ASAP as is. The only thing needed would be a new package that is declared to be the release package! Is there a will for a release? If so, can the release be done by February 24th 2021? ---rony P.S.: Also, once a release is done, I would suggest to make sure to create a yearly (!) release, even if they are only microreleases! This will signal ongoing maintenance and development to outsiders/users of ooRexx, which has been the case for all those past years (but lacking releases this was not communicated successfully to outsiders/users of ooRexx). P.P.S.: In today's world the release cycles are critical to public reception of the healthiness of (software) projects it seems, probably the main reason why Linux creates even twice a year a release, but also Java/OpenJDK and others. _______________________________________________ Oorexx-devel mailing list Oorexx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oorexx-devel
