[Ironruby-core] Regarding IronRuby... How true it sounds from this blog

[John Lam (IRONRUBY)]

Michael Letterle:

> In a technical fashion?  No.  From an emotional standpoint?  Yes.
> Right now IronRuby is very unstable from the view of an outside
> contributor, you don't know if the code you're working on now is going
> to need /major/ changes in the next drop, and you don't know when
> that's going to be.  Why work on a bug that "in truth" may already be
> fixed?

Agreed. We do maintain our external bug list in Rubyforge which folks can monitor (are you all receiving update mails on status changes in tracker?). So you'll know when we've fixed a bug when you see the Resolution changes from None to Accepted along with some kind of comment that says 'fixed in next release'.

> The most important change that MSFT can do is let you push to rubyforge
> DIRECTLY, none of this internal updates pushed to rubyforge once in a
> while.  I assume it's corporate preventing this, because it really make
> no sense otherwise.  What we have here isn't an OSS community project
> in the traditional sense, what we have is a Microsoft project that
> they've so kindly, in their infinite wisdom allow us commoners to work
> on now and then.  Oh but you can't see or touch the real code until
> we're ready to let you.  This is HIGHLY discouraging.

I've set the releases traditionally based on whether we had something 'interesting' to ship. Sometimes we might go a week or even longer before substantive changes happen in the Ruby tree. Such is life when working on compilers - you simply do not check in very often. Remember that we have Tomas as a full time dev and me as a part time dev on this project. We're hiring as well - please send me mail off-list if you're interested.

You'll see more frequent changes in the DLR tree since they have more devs working on the project.

Thanks,
-John