[REBOL] Re: Who read this mailing list?
From: carl:cybercraft at: 25-Nov-2007 0:55
On Saturday, 24-Novenber-2007 at 17:27:12 Henrik Mikael Kristensen wrote,
>On 24/11/2007, at 1.42, Carl Read wrote:
>
>>
>> On Saturday, 24-Novenber-2007 at 1:08:04 Giuseppe Chillemi wrote,
>>
>>> I have read everywhere to have a personal opinion about the release
>>> date:
>>> Rebol 3 won't be complete for another one and half year. Expect a
>>> alpha/beta
>>> during the end of the winter/start of the spring; all protocols
>>> will be
>>> ready by the end of 2008/start of 2009 and then the new VID will
>>> see the
>>> light. In 2009 rebol will face the major debugging work and in
>>> 2010/2011
>>> many external modules will be integrated into Rebol new open
>>> architecture.
>>
>> That's a very long three months...
>
>That seems about right for the 2008 part, but VID3 will be available
>with the first alpha according to the current plan as approved by
>Carl. Having monitored the progress closely (I helped testing the
>prototypes), I think it took only a few days to build the first
>prototype, about a week more to develop the second one and in about 4
>weeks, we got to where we are now with extending the second
>prototype. But development has stopped right now, because Gabriele
>has been busy elsewhere for about 2 months and it's not certain when
>he will return, because he keeps being pulled back to work on
>something unrelated to R3. He's crucial for moving VID3 forward. We
>also need to develop at least one more prototype before the design
>can be deemed good enough. It doesn't take long for Gabriele to do
>it, but he is unfortunately busy.
>
>So why can't someone else, perhaps a lazy guy like me do that?
>
>All coders and contributors are specialists in their own area with me
>working on VID3 GUI appearance, DevBase GUI, generic testing and the
>Cookbook list for DocBase. This is the best I can do and if I were to
>try to work on VID3, I'd be ruining Gabriele's work with inferior
>code, because VID3 is a pretty good design so far and I can't carry
>that torch, so to speak. My face turns white, every time I look at
>the VID3 code. :-) Cyphre is the specialist in low level graphics,
>GOBs and WinXP graphics integration. He knows how to bring the best
>performance out of AGG. Brian Tiffin works on DocBase and knows
>things about MediaWiki that we others don't. And so there are great
>people working in each narrow field.
>
>The truth right now is that RT needs hard core expert coders, not PR.
> From where I'm sitting, it looks to me that all the best coders are
>strained very hard to make stuff for R3 right now. They are under
>contract for doing unrelated work and that delays all the juicy parts
>of R3 for a few months. That's unfortunate, but PR will not help
>that.
Well it's not PR I was wanting, but more realistic timeframes like you (and Giuseppe)
are providing here. But they should really be on rebol.com somewhere, so can be considered
official.
The problem for those already using REBOL (but outside of the inner circle) is we get
comments on the mailing list here along the lines of "R2 is obsolete", yet we don't know
how long it'll be before its replacement appears in a form that's good enough to actually
be used as a replacement. Of course we continue using R2, but it's hard to imagine starting
something with it that's supposed to have a long shelf-life.
Many thanks for this response.
-- Carl Read.
