1.8 time frame?

1.8 time frame?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

hi there?

What's the latest update on the status of the guile 1.8 release plan?
Right now, we are getting GC bugreports for Lilypond, and I am very
reluctant to investigate these, since

* I am pretty sure that they will not occur on the new GC (since it is
  more lax with allocation).

* it only occurs on windows, and I have a strong desire not to be
  involved with windows programming.


Have you considered moving to a regular release schedule (like the
GNOME project does?).  The last stable release is from september
2002. The current release schedule makes it very unattractive to
contribute to GUILE, since improvements take forever to reach the
stable branch.

-- 

 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   hanwen@xs4all.nl   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen 




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Re: 1.8 time frame?

[Marius Vollmer]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@xs4all.nl> writes:

> What's the latest update on the status of the guile 1.8 release plan?

It is getting closer, it's hard to say when it will arrive.  I'm
working full-time on the new C API for data type conversions, and I
hope that I have strings and symbols nailed next week.  The rest
should be simpler...

> Have you considered moving to a regular release schedule (like the
> GNOME project does?).

Hmm, my feeling is that this will not work very well with Guile since
Guile is a much smaller project with fewer people working on it.

> The current release schedule makes it very unattractive to
> contribute to GUILE, since improvements take forever to reach the
> stable branch.

Yeah, I can understand this.  Hopefully, changes will be smaller in
the future so that we don't need to wait so long.

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Re: 1.8 time frame?

[Andy Wingo]

On Sun, 15 Aug 2004, Marius Vollmer wrote:

> Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@xs4all.nl> writes:
> 
> > Have you considered moving to a regular release schedule (like the
> > GNOME project does?).
> 
> Hmm, my feeling is that this will not work very well with Guile since
> Guile is a much smaller project with fewer people working on it.

OTOH, there do seem to be a number of people *using* guile. Having a
release known to occur at X time could motivate these people to
contribute because their efforts would be distributed widely.

For instance, I feel no urge to switch to 1.7 because I have no idea
when 1.8 will be out, and I don't want to make apps without
dependencies. Others probably think the same, which deprives the
newly-ploughed 1.7 codebase of testing.

I see where you're coming from, and it does take good, coordinated
programmers to work on a language interpreter. Still, some people could
help that aren't now.

Regards,
--
Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>
http://ambient.2y.net/wingo/


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Re: 1.8 time frame?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

mvo@zagadka.de writes:
> > What's the latest update on the status of the guile 1.8 release plan?
> 
> It is getting closer, it's hard to say when it will arrive.  I'm
> working full-time on the new C API for data type conversions, and I
> hope that I have strings and symbols nailed next week.  The rest
> should be simpler...

I understand that you can't give a definite ETA, but is "closer"
measured in weeks, months or quarter years?  I have a very nasty
heisenbug here, and I would rather not debug it, if possible.

> > Have you considered moving to a regular release schedule (like the
> > GNOME project does?).
> 
> Hmm, my feeling is that this will not work very well with Guile since
> Guile is a much smaller project with fewer people working on it.

In any case I would welcome this very much. Most of my contributions
were due to LilyPond. I find it very frustrating to wait for years for
my changes to show up.  I prefer released software with some rough
edges to perfect software which is not released at all. Surely current
CVS is better in all regards than the 1.6 release?  I don't see the
point of postponing releases.

Anyway, my 2 cents.

-- 

 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   hanwen@xs4all.nl   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen 



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Re: 1.8 time frame?

[Thamer Al-Harbash]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:

> In any case I would welcome this very much. Most of my contributions
> were due to LilyPond. I find it very frustrating to wait for years for
> my changes to show up.  I prefer released software with some rough
> edges to perfect software which is not released at all. Surely current
> CVS is better in all regards than the 1.6 release?  I don't see the
> point of postponing releases.

I recommend monthly minor releases so that people who write code
that links to guile can always say "upgrade to version 1.6.62"
until another major version comes around.

I've had some frustration where I send fixes in, not to guile
specifically, and it takes the library maintainers up to six
months to finally include the fix and release a new version. This
caused me a lot of stress in the past.

-- 
Thamer Al-Harbash
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Re: 1.8 time frame?

[Marius Vollmer]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <hanwen@xs4all.nl> writes:

> I understand that you can't give a definite ETA, but is "closer"
> measured in weeks, months or quarter years?

Months.

> In any case I would welcome this very much. Most of my contributions
> were due to LilyPond. I find it very frustrating to wait for years for
> my changes to show up.  I prefer released software with some rough
> edges to perfect software which is not released at all. Surely current
> CVS is better in all regards than the 1.6 release?

It is worse in the sense that it changes much more violently.  But
since we try to be more backwards compatible now, there shouldn't be
much harm in doing this.

> I don't see the point of postponing releases.

You are probably right, we should make more visible releases of the
1.7 series.  The snapshots are there, but you can't count them as
releases.

So, I will complete my string work (moving SRFI-14 into the core,
probably), and then make a 1.7.1 release.


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