chromatic wrote:
Seems to me that it's up to Red Hat if they want to support Parrot 1.0 for 18 or 36 or however many months they maintain software, for money.
Well, obviously that's true, but if they're basing the release on Fedora 11, what are the odds they would add it as something extra?
Since Parrot 1.0 was designated as a supported release intended for production systems and distribution packaging, it seems appropriate to try to get distributions to actually start packaging it now. Fedora 11 happens to be moving into beta now, so it may be a hard sell because it would violate their feature freeze, but I think a case could be made that it would be valuable to future production systems to be able to run Perl 6 code. Even if they don't package Rakudo yet, if they include Parrot 1.0, those systems will be able to run programs compiled with Rakudo elsewhere.
It's much the same case as for having a JVM installed by default, and possibly an even better case, because Perl 5 is such a core component of Linux systems and Parrot is designed to run many languages. Getting Parrot 1.0 out there and into distributions as soon as possible would position Parrot (and languages using Parrot) much better for future production use. Wouldn't that be a worthy goal?
Granted, Red Hat might decide not to include it, but Fedora is community-driven and they should be willing to accept it, if someone is willing to maintain the package for Fedora. The big question is whether there's any possible way to convince them to include it in the final release of Fedora 11 instead of having to wait for Fedora 12. Since it would be a new package that couldn't break any current packages, it would really be a no-risk proposition for Fedora, it just violates their feature freeze. Hopefully the arguments for getting the installed base out there to support Perl 6 and other languages might be enough to convince them...
Deven _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
