[slime-devel] NEWS

[David Steuber]

Brian Mastenbrook <bmastenb at cs.indiana.edu> writes:

> I know fetching from CVS is easy, but that's not the point here. The
> fact that there has been no release yet send the wrong message, I
> think.

Not that I disagree, but to play devil's advocate development still
seems to be changing the code base fairly quickly.  While SLIME is
certainly useable right now (depending on your definition of
useable), the rate of change in the codebase suggests instability.

A minor pet peeve I have about many free software (or open source the
non tm version) projects is the 0.x releases that never seem to make
it to 1.0 (or just haven't yet).  I know that is a feature, not a
bug.  But I think that the SLIME project is doing something rather
courageous by not cutting an early release.

Right now, it feels more like XP.  Release early and often.  This is
the time for user input to iron out the major issues before a real
1.0 release.  Of course more people with a sense of adventure to run
the CVS version (HEAD, not FAIRLY-STABLE) would be a good thing if
you buy the theory that many eye balls make bugs shallow.

That said, SLIME is quite useable.  Perhaps it is time to consider
what needs to happen before the SLIME maintainers are willing to slap
a version 1.0 or at least a version 1.0 RC1 tag onto CVS.  Most of
the supported Lisps are not fast moving targets.  So if the features
are there, then its just the nastier bugs that need to be stomped.

While I run Emacs from CVS on Mac OSX, I run the version in
Debian/testing on Linux.  I would recomend slime.el being functional
with the latter version as it is the current "stable" version.  The
same would apply to XEmacs compatibility.  GNU Emacs in CVS is a
moving target and it shows.  Or at least it introduces even more
variables into the equation.

-- 
I wouldn't mind the rat race so much if it wasn't for all the damn cats.