I just sent the message below to the parrot packagers mailing list on Debian; I felt it was also worth sharing with p6c. I'm certain there are people who disagree greatly with what I wrote -- and that's fine -- I just wanted to make sure my current perspective on this topic was available to p6c as well.
Pm ----- Forwarded message from "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmich...@pobox.com> ----- Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2012 02:54:57 -0500 From: "Patrick R. Michaud" <pmich...@pobox.com> To: Allison Randal <alli...@parrot.org> Cc: pkg-parrot-de...@lists.alioth.debian.org Subject: Re: [Pkg-parrot-devel] Parrot 4.0.0 On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 09:46:21AM -0700, Allison Randal wrote: > On 04/07/2012 09:15 AM, Alessandro Ghedini wrote: > > > > Actually, I have uploaded [Parrot 4.0.0] just now (I was kind > > of waiting for your response, though I've not been explicit). > > I agree with you anyway, but I think (and hope) that the rakudo > > (and nqp) release and development process will change as soon > > as a "1.0" release will come near. > > That could be years in the future. [...] ...or years in the past. FWIW, within the Rakudo development team we don't think of ourselves as building up to an eventual "1.0 release" -- we think of our "1.0 release" as having occurred sometime in the past (e.g., in summer 2010). As far as we're concerned, we're already in something of a "post-1.0" environment. Many people can justifiably argue that Rakudo isn't stable or complete enough to be called "1.0" yet, and I can completely understand that perspective. But when we try to pin folks down on what they would expect from "1.0" that Rakudo doesn't have now, we find that either (1) we've already achieved it, (2) they're looking for features that we expect to be evolving in the context of a user community (e.g., an equivalent to CPAN, which I posit is generally a post-1.0 development for *any* language), or (3) they expect things that are relatively unbounded, only vaguely described, and/or not really compatible with ongoing Perl 6 evolutionary constraints. Thus we largely conceive that Rakudo has already entered a phase of its lifetime where improved stability, completeness, and usability will come about through continued incremental evolution and increased adoption over time. To me, that's a "post-1.0" state of affairs for a programming language. So to return to the original thread: we don't have a "1.0" target in our future that might spur development in a particular area such as release process. Instead, like any product we tend to respond to the needs articulated by our client base. This client base definitely includes packagers. If Rakudo's release and development process aren't supporting packagers well, we're very eager to making improvements quickly. Just keep in mind that nearly all of the release/development process we have in place today for Rakudo exists because of the current and ongoing realities of developing for Parrot, and not because we're lazy or uncaring about the packaging process. Pm _______________________________________________ Pkg-parrot-devel mailing list pkg-parrot-de...@lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/pkg-parrot-devel ----- End forwarded message -----
