World: r3wp

Hmm, according to Carl's comment in following blog comment section, 
it seems we are not going to get SSL in an easy way, unless someone 
from community does it :-( .... that is bad, as it might never come 
.... http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r?view=0290#comments

But maybe some networkin guru will appear here, and will pick-up, 
where Holger left :-)

Followup on R3 marketing - http://reboltutorial.com/blog/marketing-sits-above-strategy/

It will be a shame if Rebol3 doesn't support SSL. I think Rebol's 
buitlt-in network features such as the HTTP:// and Mail:// schemes 
used to be a big attraction. I think that not supporting them properly 
in R3, being able to read and write Gmail for example, is like shooting 
yourself in the foot from a marketing perspective.

Agreed, not being able to access GMail out of the box is a real negative...

Yes, that would be bad. Fortunately the relevant will be in the open 
source portion of R3, so it shouldn't be too difficult for the community 
to add. R3 is a community project, remember.

The Putty SSL code is supposed to be good and tiny, so we cold adapt 
that.

I would still expect such fundamental feature to be delivered by 
RT.

Community project, partially open source, and what you are talking 
about is in the open source portion. Volunteers? Contributions?

Do you think Python magically got SSL support? Nope, someone contributed 
it.

Being an open source part, implemented by a third party, doesn't 
mean it's not "delivered by RT" as seen from the user's perspective.

I think people are still thinking of R3 based on the situation with 
R2. With R2 if something wasn't "delivered by RT", you couldn't do 
it at all in some (lower-level) cases. This is simply not true with 
R3. R3 is not a black box, and SSL in particular would be easy to 
retrofit even if the base distribution doesn't include it. Plus, 
the pace of development of R3 is pretty fast, and any release that 
doesn't have the feature you want could be followed pretty quickly 
with a release that includes it. The only limitation is time, effort, 
and money (to buy the other two). If people don't contribute, it 
doesn't get done, period. If you want the feature, add it yourself 
or pay someone to write it. Adding it yourself will be easy in this 
case - we'll see about how easy the other method will be.

implemented by a third party

 - this is just wrong. In a community project, anyone in the community 
 is a first party. The only third-parties are the ones who don't contribute.

I'm a little surprised to hear this from you two, Pekr and Henrik, 
since both of you *do* contribute quite a lot. Good work, guys :)

by third party, I simply meant "not at Carl's house" :-)

Well, that's all right then :)

WIth R3, I suppose we can include as little or as much as we want 
and still get an R3, that is a whole product as seen by an end-user.

Brian: I judge situation upon recent experience! Networking protocols 
are NOT delivered by anyone for something like 3 years. So "it can 
be" means nothing for me, especially for the low-level C code of 
certain quality. How many C coders do we have here? How many of them 
are able to write the code, which would be accepted by Carl to be 
included in official distro?

As for me, current situation means just one thing. As a customer/developer, 
looking at feature sheet for R3, searching for the SSL and HTTPS, 
all I can see is big NO.

the feature is so fundamental, like Unicode is. That is why it should 
be delivered by default, with no excuses. There is no web without 
https nowadays ...

That's funny, I see the same thing when I look for the "not an alpha" 
feature :(

If we did not get single networking protocol in 3 years, no single 
fix to http protocol (and we are talking mezzanine level here), WHEN 
do you expect, that feature like SSL/TLS, https could appear for 
R3? That is my only worry here. I am not agains the delivery by some 
"third party", I am just worried judging by recent experience ...

Not looking recently enough. However, your approach is counterproductive 
here. Asking for "RT" to provide this feature is not appropriate 
for a community project. What you should be asking for is contributions. 
RT's time is finite, and we have to triage features based on their 
feasibility, not just how "important" they are. The increasing proportion 
of R3 that is or will be open source is a testament to that. Every 
part of R3 that is open source is *our* responsibility, not just 
RT's.

People can say that a feature is important, but in a community project, 
in the community-created portion of that project, the way you express 
the importance of a feature is with time, effort, or the money to 
buy time and effort. As you have done with HTTP. If the community 
thinks that SSL in an important feature to have, then get to work. 
Complaining only has limited usefulness.

Is there a bounty on native SSL ?

not yet. We need bounties imo ...

I should note... HTTP stalled because I never got answers by Carl... 
about how to implement timeouts (has support for timeouts been added 
to ports in the meantime?), how to handle errors (i think i have 
a decent implementation, so maybe this is ok), what the semantic 
of QUERY should be, and so on. there are a ton of little details 
about port schemes that have not been DESIGNED yet...

(same thing that happened with R/S... priorities switched)

hmm, interesting ...

I thought that networking device is finished ...

More importantly are there people who can do the work if bounties 
are set?

Bounties may not be a bad idea, but you have to get the right people 
to do the work.

yes, I think that bounties of type - pick your bounty - would not 
work here.

If we don't try, we won't know

e.g. networking protocols - those could be done imo only by Gabriele, 
or BrianH ... (hope I don't offend others). Carl might be picky, 
what code gets in. It definitely can't be done by me for example 
:-)

I like http://bounties.morphzone.org/, because you can see, who 
contributed. The trouble might be - does any such system allows cancellation 
ob bounty, their merge, etc? What happens to money, if bounty's goal 
is not fulfilled?

that's an odd money distribution. the most important thing is site 
maintenance? :-)

I looked a bit more on MOD, MODULO, REMAINDER and //. Isn't there 
too many of those functions? I found, MOD is giving some strange 
results:

>> mod -8. -3.
== -5.0

It makes sense to me to either just use the C ways of doing modulus, 
if it's fast:

% for integer! and
fmod () for decimal!


or do it in a more correct way mathematically, maybe (pseudocode):

result of a // b = a - floor (a, b) * b

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_arithmetic#Functional_representation_of_the_remainder
and: http://functions.wolfram.com/IntegerFunctions/Mod/02/

I searched the scripts in the library at rebol.org, and only a handful 
(which is very few) use MOD. A script or two even make their own 
version of MOD to give correct output.

AFAIK MOD and // are not the same.

I think, you are right. It seems, REMAINDER should do the same as 
//. My question is, if we need 3 different modulus functions? Today 
we have REMAINDER, MOD and MODULO, and at least MOD is giving some 
strange results in some cases. I would guess, having one function 
and one operator should be enough.

Ask yourself, if you were going to use a modulus function, which 
one would you use? And why?

I suppose it depends on the situation. I guess there would be three 
different versions, because Carl saw a need for them all. I discovered 
the difference when I used MOD in a situation where // worked as 
it should.

I tried mod 3.3 1.1 - it reutrns a negtative number - I have reported 
this in CureCode

There are related bugs, it seems. This should return a value close 
to zero:

>> 3.3 - ((round/floor 3.3 / 1.1) * 1.1)
== 1.1


It's not good, that there still are bugs on such a basic level. (Often 
when I dig into these things, I say to myself, that I should shut 
up and wait for a release.)

Right now, all op! functions redirect to corresponding action! functions. 
// redirects to REMAINDER, which is why we need it.

When you run into major errors like PeterWood's above, report them. 
Since MOD and MODULO are mezzanine, they can be fixed right away 
by someone with the right math knowledge. Ladislav?

I'm not questioning, that we need a modulus function (REMAINDER). 
I'm questioning, if we really need 3 of them. If REMAINDER doesn't 
do, what it's supposed to, then I would fix that instead of adding 
2 new functions.