Dog food, wine, and the road to the release
Microsoft talks about how they like to eat their own dog food, meaning, they like to use their own development tools.
I agree with that general concept, except of course, as a winemaker, I
rather prefer to drink our own wine. (I've never tasted the food I give
my dog, but it doesn't smell that great, so why eat it.)
Nothing helps improve REBOL more than when we use it for our own purposes. It's
a type of stress test where you discover the deeper problems, because you're not just writing tests, your actually trying to get work done. It's not theory, it's reality.
As I wrote earlier this month, it's time to get R3 into the hands of
more developers. In order to do that, there are a number of important
issues that need to be solved, and this has been the week to solve them.
It's been the week of making decisions.
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Issue
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Solution
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Discussion
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Distribution
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Website URL
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Nothing fancy is needed here, as long as developers recognize that they
are using a test version of REBOL that is not 100% complete (will have
bugs and more changes). In fact, the biggest task here is to automate
the web page so we can make updates as easy as possible.
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Documentation
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DocBase wiki
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I think we all agree that Mediawiki (the wiki tool) is not perfect, but
it is at least a starting point. We can revisit this issue again,
if someone wants to supervise a better alternative to it.
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Bug Database
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CureCode
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For keeping track of bugs, we will be using CureCode, a REBOL product
from SoftInnov. We thank them for hosting it on their site. So, we're
drinking some good wine here.
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Source Archive
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DevBase
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Here's where we really need to drink our own wine. I spent a lot of time
on DevBase earlier this year, and although it's missing a few remaining
features, I think it can be improved to do the job. In addition, a new
R3 GUI will be created for R3 to directly access DevBase. I expect it
to be less work than R2, and it will greatly help us to improve R3.
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Communications
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(undecided)
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This has been difficult to solve, and the development community has
discussed a range of possibilities. Unfortunately, when something is
difficult to solve, it means that the requirements are not well defined or are overly complicated.
(See earlier blog.)
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As I wrote before, the schedule is to get the above completed this month
(Nov). So far, we're 2 of 5. The distribution web page is minor, because
we have tools for that.
The DevBase improvements are very important to me personally, and I'm
eager to reshape it in R3, because it's an excellent test (and a
superior motivator).
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