World: r3wp

Past performance is not predictor of future development practices 
in the REBOL world, you should know that by now. Think about how 
different last year was from the year before.

Past predictions of future development are consistently wrong .. 
you should now that by now

Yup, that too. Especially when they are based on what happened in 
the past.

As R3 has no official release still in alpha mode and because there's 
a big shift between R2 and R3, professionnals user's of REBOL really 
need to have a plan for R2 support, R2 bug fixes, R2 enhancement...

Is there's something to migrate script written in R2 to script in 
R3 ?

Not yet, as R3 is a bit of a moving target. Most R2 code will run 
in R3 if it doesn't use any GUI or port code. Part of the migration 
strategy has been the R2/Forward stuff, which allows you to write 
code in a more R3-like way in R2. Plus, we are backporting some of 
the native enhancements that are additive rather than changing, like 
SELECT on objects.

We have a few plans for R2 enhancement, mostly the View installer 
on Windows, but for the most part we are just backporting enhancements 
from R3 whenever we can and they are backwards compatible. Bug fixes 
and additions, no big changes, that is the policy. R2 is in backwards-compatibility 
mode as a rule.

On my windows XP SP3 the VIEW is failing as invalid exe; the CORE 
is fine;  these are both numbered 3.1 for 2.7.8 and no change with 
fresh download; the inspected exe is not garbage but kicks this error 
whether in open cmd session console or fired by explorer - I did 
not try under Cygwin or MSys yet ...

works here with XP SP3

Here on XP SP3 all of the exes, including View, Core and the SDK 
programs all work. Have you tried redownloading and reextracting? 
Are there other system settings or software that you have that might 
affect this? Which antimalware or firewall apps are you using?

I can't find the 2.7.8 download - anyone have a link - windows here.

Here is the main link, to be simple for everyone: http://www.rebol.com/downloads/v278/

Thanks Brian.

Yes, yes  ..  so to try to get to the bottom of this - what shoud 
the true byte count of that VIEW exe be, please ?  thanks

>> checksum/method read/binary %rebol-view-278-3-1.exe 'md5
== #{AA2F4FD92FE00DE85428F39A6E0E9CFD}

hm.. interesting...

>> checksum/method bin: read/binary http://www.rebol.com/downloads/v278/rebol-core-278-3-1.exe
'md5
== #{517DBC6EBEEF92B98515DD38AA590BAF}

ech.. core != view

>> checksum/method bin: read/binary http://www.rebol.com/downloads/v278/rebol-view-278-3-1.exe
'md5
== #{AA2F4FD92FE00DE85428F39A6E0E9CFD}

write/binary %r278.exe bin
call/shell "r278.exe"
;-)

one indicator: IE 8 (which is not my default now since I moved to 
K-mleon) runs VIEW 2.7.8 as a right-click option using RUN - but 
download with IE8 and run from Explorer file view correctly triggers 
a request to authorize due to no "valid" digital signature for MS 
- yet this MS alert fails to trigger when run after download using 
K-meleon browser (yet no issue after K-meleon downloads CORE 2.7.8 
)

this is a K-Meleon Windows browser gift  - maybe sometimes smaller/faster 
is not better ... KMeleon is writing to a USB ext drive and IE8 is 
writing to an internal HD ... sometimes KM is writing the larger 
VIEW exe intact, sometimes not.  This may account for some recent 
"bad" ZIP's from my x-plane Flightsim community.  Yuch.  Most of 
 those x-p guys always zip up all their Win indexing .Thumb or hidden 
Mac files - and sometimes they have accumulated both from working 
on a Win "airplane" on their Mac. So I am used to annoying ZIP's 
for that hobby ... but this is TOO annoying.

The request-to-authorize thing is managed by an extended attribute 
in one of the other forks of the file on NTFS, and not on FAT. Have 
you tried Chrome or Firefox?

Have you tried downloading the zip file containing the exe instead 
of the exe directly? http://www.rebol.com/downloads/v278/rebol-view-278-3-1.zip

Looks like we have OSX Intel and Linux Libc6 builds now.

Cool

Woohoo, also looks like the /View Linux libc6 builds (4-2) are no 
longer broken.

It would be good if 'ajoin were present

It has been since 2.7.7.

Ahh.. well, one of these days I shall upgrade from 2.7.6

2.7.8.2.5 seems to start a lot faster (than 2.7.7.2.5).

RobertS, yes, it's a good idea to check what filesystem is on your 
USB drive.

I find the technical arguments for leaving out /Library very hard 
to believe. I suspect this is a case of RT pulling a Microsoft, by 
making design decisions subordinate to business considerations

2.7.8 turned out to have to be a minimal release, due to outside 
constraints. That means it's time to talk about 2.7.9.

In this case, we're really still talking about 2.7.7

The code in R2 that implements those business constraints is still 
code, so changing stuff still takes work.

Pity that the 2.7.8 roadmap wasn't updated: http://www.rebol.com/docs/changes-2-7.html

2.7.7 also turned out to have to be a minimal release at the time. 
It's hard to budget time for major native changes in R2, partly due 
to business constraints (who is paying for this work? noone that 
I know of, and adding Library to Core removes a revenue source without 
replacing it with another), and partly due to the nature of the codebase 
itself.

Yes, Doc, I have been requesting that too. And Carl (belatedly) said 
to hold off on using or announcing the SDK (don't know why).

I repeat: I find the technical arguments very hard to believe

That's your perogative, since you haven't seen the code, and haven't 
discussed the code with Carl.

I'm not going to defend RT against trolls anymore, because they are 
proven right this way

I don't need to see the code, because it's very simple: there's Pro, 
and you only have to disable some parts of it

I agree.

rebview278 still fails when run in a non-X environment. So `Change 
"bad face in screen pane" issue on non-X env boot` was not done.

That seemed to be a business consideration a year ago, so I was hoping 
it carried some weight

Andreas, the changes doc wasn't updated yet. Most of the native changes 
that didn't have checkmarks next to them weren't done. This was a 
minimal release, so some stuff got put off to 2.7.9. Give me a moment 
and I will try to list the changes in that list that were in this 
release.

Nevermind. Prompted by Kaj mentioning it previously, I was just checking 
if this was fixed in 2.7.8 and found it it wasn't.

Instead of access-os there are also new natives list-env and set-env

BrianH: what are you talking about? Wasn't /shell and /library released 
for the /Core for free already?

talking any "revenue" in regards to RT and business, is quite funny 
imo ...

Not Library