[slime-devel] Re: NEWS

[Bill_Clementson at peoplesoft.com]

Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:

> Helmut Eller <e9626484 at stud3.tuwien.ac.at> writes:
>
> > Today we received bugreports like "CLISP hangs on startup", "SBCL dies
> > with SIGBUS", "can't set FPU modes".  Desn't seem like SLIME is ready
> > for release and making a tarball will not help us getting there.
>
> I agree. Our current rock&roll development style makes this all pretty
> easy to handle: "Foo is broken [here's a patch]." "Fixed in CVS now."
> Much more fun than "That'll be fixed in the next release."
>
> The important thing is to make the best Emacs programming mode known
> to man in the fastest and most enjoyable way. The rest is secondary.
>
> But thanks Brian for the vote of confidence in the current maturity!
> However, I think having cautious people avoid SLIME initially is a
> much lesser evil than having them download it thinking it's more
> mature than it really is and then curse and swear at it.
>
> BTW, SLIME is the most fun project I've been involved in and I
> attribute much of this to everyone using the same CVS code. With 31
> hackers listed in the ChangeLog we must be doing something right :-)

I agree with Brian that SLIME is mature enough for a release. However, I
also agree with Luke that it's more fun working with the CVS copy.

The reasons that most people want a release are:

1. Some people don't like downloading out of CVS and prefer a tarball.
2. A release provides a "fixed" snapshot that you can be pretty sure works
(more or less)
3. A release says to the world "We're ready for users now"

I don't know if these reasons really apply to SLIME.

For #1, as Helmut has mentioned, it is possible to download a tarball of
the current CVS SLIME from:
http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/cvs_root.tar.gz?tarball=1&cvsroot=slime

This effectively negates #1. It might be worthwhile to mention the tarball
in the docs and/or CLiki so that CVS-adverse users aren't scared away.

Reason #2 isn't really that important either, since the turn-around on bugs
is so quick :-). For the super-wary, the FAIRLY-STABLE download provides an
alternative. Is a tarball of the FAIRLY-STABLE code available also?

Reason #3 is a subjective consideration. I know that I held off trying
SLIME for a long time because I thought it was still a work-in-progress and
not ready for production use. However, there are a lot of people
recommending SLIME now and I would say that it has the highest mindshare of
the Emacs CL modes. You guys just have to learn to bite your tongues and
stop saying it isn't mature enough yet ;-)

The downside to producing a release is that you encourage people to take
the "stable" release as opposed to the "flaky" CVS version. This divides
users and means that there are fewer eyes checking the latest code. When
you have a stable, slow-changing product, this is ok. However, since there
is so much active (and enthusiastic) development on SLIME, I'd say there
isn't a lot of benefit in producing a "Release" yet.

- Bill