[slime-devel] Massive PR Campaign (Was: Re: NEWS)

[Luke Gorrie]

Okay!

So you guys convinced me that we should make more of an effort to
explain SLIME to people, since currently it's like "the world's worst
kept secret." Based on Bill's thoughts I think we can make Brian
somewhat happy without actually making release tarballs :-)

To this end I have done two drastic things: made a new webpage (with
HTML-hacking help from #lisp) and posted an up-to-date description of
SLIME to comp.lang.lisp. I have represented us as being "at version
0.13" (i.e. FAIRLY-STABLE is at the SLIME-0-13 tag), which I hope
helps explain our current state in reasonably meaningful
version-number terms.

Re: making a real release, I think that when we first discussed this
the main things we needed were (in my mind):

  Stable code (no awful bugs that force an upgrade within a few months)
  Clean code (our backend interface was a mess for a long time)
  Documentation
  Proper web page

I think we're now substantially closer to having releasable code, and
we pretty much have a proper manual and web page. So although we
haven't been planning how to make a release, I do think we've been
moving steadily towards a release-worthy state all the same.

Cheers,
Luke