Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Version 1.0?

[John M. S. <sk...@oz...>]

Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons wrote:

>     Bonjour,
> 
> 
>>It is necessary to provide on-site documentation to what is
>>*officially* working properly, and to include that in any release.
>>
> 
> Not stating clearly what does work and what doesn't is a mistake I
> have done in Baire. I really think Jonh Max Skaller is right in this
> point and OCaml-lib should avoid doing the same mistake I did.
> 
> 
>>If you do that, it doesn't matter if the other half of the library
>>isn't ready. Release it anyhow.
>>
>>	release early, release often
>>
> 
> One of the problems is the stability of interfaces. I have broken and
> rewritten from scratch Baire several times, and I will continue doing
> so until I get it right.


I am the same with Felix. It's been around for 3-4 years, and never 

announced. But really, I think it is necessary to credit the initial
users of a package with a willingness to rewrite the code that uses
your package as you change it.

Unless of course, you are lucky, and get 100K users on the first
day :-)


> It is important to be able to do such things when you are not an
> experimented developer in the concerned field (and Baire surely is my
> first data structure library).
 
> I don't know how the Caml-lib team feels it, but I first though
> 'initial' Baire would be the only one and I realized much later there
> were a lot of wrong things in it.


So? There are a lot of things wrong with C++ too.

And plenty of problems with Ocaml itself.
And there are many that you won't even find yourself:
you need users to help you both find problems,
and also to prioritorise them.

One thing Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python,
once said to me was that all that really mattered was
users. (Meaning, your product is good if it attracts
a lot of users).

I don't entirely agree, but he has a point.
And you won't have any users if you don't release :-)

Be willing to be caught out making a mistake.

[Arggg .. I can't release Felix yet .. its incomplete ..
its got bugs ..]

Yeah, its really hard to do, especially for an individual.

Well, its easier for a group.
So I vote:

RELEASE ExtLib within one week no matter what.

I want to use it! I don't CARE if its bugged,

or if the interfaces aren't right yet.

Thing is, I don't have any idea yet, because I haven't
tried using it, and I CANNOT make my package depend
on a CVS archive or my own private copy of the code.
[indeed, there is a licencing issue: Felix is FFAU]

-- 
John Max Skaller, mailto:sk...@oz...
snail:10/1 Toxteth Rd, Glebe, NSW 2037, Australia.
voice:61-2-9660-0850