From: Steven A. <au...@wa...> - 2004-04-01 18:20:28
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Steve Blackburn wrote: [...] > The less convenient it is to try out Jikes RVM the fewer people will do > so. I agree. [...] > I don't see why any of the above means that we need to do our release > early. > > If Mark needs the current functionality now, then he should use the cvs > head. The alternative sets an impossible precident. If we were to do a > special release each time someone wanted to produce results for > publication, we'd be doing rather a lot of releases. Those are excellent points. For me, this isn't really about Mark per se. At this point, he plans to use CVS head. This release has been delayed for weeks now. Mindshare in the Free Software community is vital to our future. Since March 17th, we've had something that meets their needs for a free VM. I have wanted to make that something available. Some of it is that I am interested by Linus Torvalds' maxim: "release early, release often." It seems to me that the community whose mindshare we want is used to a quicker release cycle. The other factor is that it seems to me that we've already done the work of getting ready for this release. A lot of my motive here is that I want to show off my work and get feedback on it now rather than later. I will, of course, not go ahead in producing a release or a prerelease, given your principled resistance. --Steve P.S.: While I was writing this, I saw that you prepped a CVS snapshot for Mark. That's certainly a clean solution. I can put up such CVS tarballs on my own FTP site when I have things I am ready to share. As you said in an earlier letter, now that we include the CVS timestamp in the output of rvm -fullversion, we have fewer problems with knowing what version someone is actually running. -- Steven Augart Jikes RVM, a free, open source, Virtual Machine: http://oss.software.ibm.com/jikesrvm |