World: r3wp

Created this group for REBOL 3.0 project general discussion purposes 
and to not flood ann-reply group. This group is web-public ....

not much was told about technical details, but according to what 
we know, we could speculate what changes will come, can't we? :-)

first to note - I was very positively surprised by the timeframe. 
And if RT wants to concentrate upon it, it means that we will get 
some alphas for testing and we will once again see - "release early, 
release often" (or how's the saying :-) type of development - which 
I always liked, because it means active participation by the community 
...

as for technical details, I am curious about new port model, as well 
as new face model (I do remember min-face blog)

And if the timeline is so short (beta in June), RT has to be already 
decided upon technical implementation, or so I think ....

but now I have another question to brainstorm - I wanted to popularise 
rebol a bit on OSNews.com - they are very open and their site is 
being visited some 100K hits a month. I wanted to post View 1.3.2. 
news, but asked for advice here on AltME, as OS-X port may not be 
ready for public adoption. On the other hand, other products get 
posted even with much smaller updates. So the question is - should 
we post REBOL 3.0 news? Some may say - pots, once there is some product 
to download. But - REBOL 3.0 is also about documentation, and the 
announcement Carl posted asks also for C coders and other kind of 
help. As a side note, we could point ppl to try View 1.3.2 - at least 
Windows and Linux users could be attracted. What do others think? 
Should we wait further? But that way we will not get any publicity 
ever ....

pots = post

reading the doc once again, I agree with Terry, that it would be 
good to restate the license. "Open" is mentioned several times there. 
The doc says that "developer features requests" will follow - I think 
that ppl will want to know, what licence they will provide their 
code to. It does not necessarily mean that closed equals evil, but 
it should be clear from the very beginning imo ...

I'd say the REBOL 3 announcement is very suitable for OSNews

I would move to some other group, like chat or something, to discuss 
the short message for OSNews.com then ...

yep, the announcement should probably go to osnews. or digg or whatever. 
:) maybe old rebolers would like to come back to have a look.

If an announcement should be made, I think some time could be spent 
dwelling over the 8 years of experience gathered with the current 
design flaws in REBOL and the intent to eliminate them. how many 
other languages go through such a rewrite effort to eliminate design 
bugs?

well, Perl 5 to 6 did it? But the community was splitted if such 
radical step was needed. But not sure it is relevant parallel, probably 
not ....

one might think its lucky the community isn't bigger, otherwise such 
a rewrite might not be possible

Ruby is doing it, and Io has been doing it pretty much continuously 
over the past four years...

I have added some funcionality to the imap handler. I guess I will 
have to rework this?

(So far it is in no way in a state to be released. I've added some 
way to handle mailboxes, but I want to do access by uid, too.)

there is some talk re ports and faces - what will happen to them? 
will the concept of unifying port model change?

I remember one blog about min-face for e.g. ...

min-face - something like that. we only have a prototype so far.

ports - the basic idea is that ports stay as series abstraction, 
and we add device! for things that are not series (think of them 
as AmigaOS devices). no more details are available and this is still 
subject to change so don't take my words as an announcement.

ok, thanks anyway ... btw - talked to DocKimbel some time ago, and 
for R# he wanted two layer port model - lower level, and higher protocol 
level .... maybe just an idea, but imo Carl knows which way to go 
:-)

ah, and event model - libevent? :-)

are you doing everything at once? replacement kernel, new view?

I would love to be involved somehow in the design of the new View 
system.

I think that some ppl would like to "influence" some things - we 
have you - Anton, we have Volker, Brian, Henrik, Ashley  and probably 
others skilled developers .... it seems to me that Carl decided as 
well as for 1.3 to create closed group, define features behind the 
closed door, to stay focused imo ...

or maybe they want to release at least some alpha framework, and 
then they will open call for developers, dunno ...

I can imagine, if they would publish some details now, we would ask 
another question - as with tasking/threading - "why to go this way, 
if xyz does it mmm way" - kind of questions :-)

but of course it would be nice to know, what is being cooked ;-)

After sort of reverse-engineering DO EVENT to try to make some nifty 
things work, I don't want to have to do all that again. I'd like 
to be able to hook into the system. I think the min-face idea is 
really good.

I'd love to have a non-vanilla input stream.

support for (oh my gosh! ) middle button? up events, tracking cap 
locks, locking insert mode, etc...

min-face with only effect/draw and feel would be sweet.

word wrap queries (like in the old amiga api) within AGG draw would 
be cool too... as in, what would the size of this text (or any gfx 
element, for that matter) be with current font/drawing settings. 
 and how many letters from a string fit within this box ? wrapped 
or not.

With regards to min-face, when I spoke to Carl about this at the 
devcon we also canvassed the idea of a text-face, image-face, draw-face, 
etc which would have facets present / optimized for the primary function 
of the face. Carl seemed pretty keen to move away from the "one face 
fits all" type approach that currently exists.

I remember what I was trying to do: event transparency. That requires 
hooking into the event system.

It would be good to have an easy way to underline one character in 
a word (indicating the keyboard shortcut for that view face).

Yes, agree. But I think that been taken into account by the push 
for rich text.

a simpler method to change the feel for common operations, like trapping 
keys would be nice, so you don't have to redo the entire feel.

There needs to be a seperate feel interface for Look and Feel.   
One of the most common complaints that I heard from people using 
VID was that they were unable to change the way a style looked without 
rewriting the feel object.  It should be easy to alter or set either 
the look or the behavior of a face without altering the other.

I'd love to see a kind of a developers summit happen as RT gets ready 
to attack each part of REBOL 3.0 they should host an online meeting 
for several hours or even all day if that's possible so that we can 
all get together here on AltME or some online conferencing software. 
 That way all the developers will have a chance to let RT know about 
their wants/needs as they develop each peice of REBOL 3.0.

Ammon - that will not imo happen, as it never happened in the past 
:-(

I can always dream though, right? ;-)

:-)

Sure ? Remember the early View 1.3 project (december 2004 or was 
it 2003?).

Anybody has it's voice and could said what he wants to see and even 
come with the code.

That was a really busy time. I could hardly keep up with all the 
testing. But it was good. :)

.

This probably belongs to Tech news channel, but - SkyOS got new rendering, 
buffered, which much improved performance. It was done by one man 
in a short period of time. I do hope we get more advanced compositing 
for new View too :-) http://www.skyos.org/?q=node/508

I couldn't help but think that he's copycatting Syllable again...

REBOL 3 for the wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin

i'm inpatient to see it  ^^ and to get a ride on the new C DLL framework 
it ill include