[Rant-cafe] is there anybody out there

[Russel Winder]

Anatoly,

On Tue, 2007-06-12 at 20:14 -0700, Anatoly Yakovenko wrote:
> Is rant still being developed?  Or has it reached perfection?

Yes and no.  Definitely not, but...  :-)

Part of the `issue' is that Stefan's direction took a turn and so he has
little time for Rant.  Xavier's life changed hugely and he basically
gave up programming.

I suspect there are quite a number of people using Rant but it does all
they need so they don't do much development of Rant itself.  Also of
course some projects use Rake rather than Rant as a base, cf. Buildr.

For my own part, I have contributed some bits and pieces for LaTeX
processing and will be updating that as and when.  Most of the LaTeX
support code I have is for book writing using LaTeX and is probably not
something that should go in Rant per se.  (The material is available
from my Subversion server if anyone wants it.) 

I may soon have to do more C++ and Fortran work at which point I will
have to decide between building up the Rant infrastructure or just using
SCons or Waf.  This is a difficult issue for me:  I prefer Ruby to
Python for this sort of thing, but the SCons infrastructure is already
there and the community very active.  It is all about community and
creating a momentum behind project development.  Last year it seemed
that there might be a number of people going to contribute more to the
Rant infrastructure, but it petered out unfortunately.

So the upshot of this is that if a group of people can agree on a
roadmap for development of Rant, and get stuck in to doing it, then it
can happen.

-- 
Russel.
====================================================
Dr Russel Winder                +44 20 7585 2200
41 Buckmaster Road              +44 7770 465 077
London SW11 1EN, UK             russel at russel.org.uk
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