Comments on: REBOL Status Report 2010.1
New for this year, these REBOL community status reports will be posted according to progress made or new goals needed, no longer monthly. Some periods will be shorter than a month, some longer. It depends on changes in progress or requirements.
During December
- The Host Kit was released. This was the first release, a draft for several developer to verify that it worked and was buildable.
- REBOL 2.7 releases where resumed. I made a promise to myself that if R3 was not released in 2009, we'd start making updates to R2 again. So, we kicked that off with the release of 2.7.7 for Core and View on several platforms. If you have a critical problem, be sure that you let us know about it for the 2.7.8 release. We will be releasing more often, even if just for a few minor changes or fixes.
- Major website revisions were started. You've probably noticed many pages have changed. Quite frankly, this is a monster project, and thus must be divided into several subprojects:
- Software - The WIP wiki software is running. It's a useful system (40K of REBOL) and saves a lot of time for doing updates and general site management. (I must admit I should have taken the time long ago to make this investment. The system is lean and agile -- new commands and features take only a couple minutes to add.)
- Content conversion - This is a major part of the project. We are looking at ten years of content that was written in many different formats with various tools and HTML editors. Since document management is important, these pages are being converted. Some will play a more important role than others, but now we have a lot more capability to handle them. Some of these pages haven't been updated (or even formatted) in nearly a decade.
- Content creation - We have several new pages that we want to add, several of which will be linked from the new home page. For example, we will be introducing REBOL differently to different groups of visitors. A beginning student wants different information than a corporate IT manager.
- Layout - The page layout is currently quite simple. This is controlled by a few REBOL functions and CSS. I'd like to add a sidebar column to many pages for links to other content or for table of contents on larger documents. However, this isn't critical right now, because the content must be fully converted first.
- Graphics - Making the pages look good shouldn't take much time. I'm holding off until the page content has been finished. Then, we can insert graphics or make other graphical changes as needed.
- Home page - Putting together the home page takes more than layout and graphics, but also marketing. The REBOL message must be clear and handling different categories of visitors is important. We'll be doing this page last, when other parts of the project are finished.
- Subsystems - Various parts of the website use their own scripts, such as this blog, R3 docs, downloads, feedback, and order system. It's not practical to merge all these. The current solution is to have the WIP Wiki build a template page that can be used by other systems to make pages look consistent.
- The RSS feed for this blog was fixed, as I mentioned in the prior status report. It should look better in most RSS readers now, including the Google reader.
Current Priorities
- Continuation of web site overhaul. See above list.
- Maintenance release for R3 -- bug fixes to handle the buildup of tickets in CureCode.
- R3 Host Kit release to all developers. This won't take much time.
- R3 graphics subsystem conversion to new Host Kit. Specifically, the graphics subsystem becomes an embedded extension within the host kit. This feature will be useful to all developers who want to build single executable binaries that include all their extensions.
- Potentially resuming with the R3 GUI project, depending on some external factors.
11 Comments Comments:
MikeL
13-Jan-2010 2:26:43 |
I am still hoping that WIP Wiki will be part of the REBOL applications being released / shared. If it is half as good as Carl says then it will benefit me greatly. The documentation problem that it addresses is a pretty common one and another success story with REBOL won't hurt. | Shadwolf
13-Jan-2010 11:17:17 |
Carl if you resume the 2.7 developement. I beg you "can you investigate why the text rendering in viva rebol under linux, vista, and seven is messy ?"
Personnally after thinking it intensively for last 6 month I think it's comming from the size-text function.
The document opening rendering is properly done on linux, windows XP, vista, seven.
But when you start moving around the "fake cursor" in area-tc then you get distortions. More you move the cursor and more you get difference betwin where the cursor should be and where it is.
As the "fake cursor" position is used to insert text in the current line. Then obviously the inserted text is not properly render.
In the fake cursor motion algorithm the base function used to determine the movement amount is the size-text function.
So if there is a problem suddently appearing with the same source code on other OS that's probably comming from size-text.
We used the cheat fixed-font and size-text to build all our interactivity part. Maybe the probleme is related on the font system internal to rebol...
You want to make a better Viewtop why not including vivarebol in it ? or area-tc once the rebol VM's bug related to font and draw/text relation is solved.
| shadwolf
13-Jan-2010 11:37:54 |
Area-tc and Viva-rebol docs, source diff and time tracs available on:
http://my-trac.assembla.com/shadwolforge/ | Carl Sassenrath
13-Jan-2010 11:39:16 |
MikeL: I very much hope to release WIP Wiki someday. It has become a real gem... one small and powerful tool that makes my life so much easier.
Shadwolf: Thank you for making this known to me.
To fix this problem, we need some very simple code that shows it that I can run and detect the problem... Keep in mind that one line of REBOL code can execute thousands of lines of C code, so the more we can determine the cause, the better.
Send me the code or post it to feedback or on RAMBO and tell me the bug number. Thanks. | Srinivas
13-Jan-2010 11:41:03 |
The new WIP Wiki is looking very good.
I agree with MikeL using MakeDoc3 and WIP Wiki for documentation will be very helpful. Having MakeDoc3 generate PDF output will help in production of printed documentation.
The ability to use REBOL on a portable USB drive to generate HTML and pdf output can help produce quality output regardless of host system. | Shadwolf
13-Jan-2010 11:44:20 |
simple code source to show the problem there you got me lol...
Unfortunatly you need the whole area-tc source code to get the text rendering working and then the bug to show his face.
I will try to make a simplier engine fast.
| shadwolf
13-Jan-2010 12:12:10 |
carl as asked i opened a ticket in rambo for this bug.
I tryed to document the best i could the bug and provide a short code.
RAMBO Ticket #-4745
| Gerard Cote
14-Jan-2010 16:10:57 |
Shadwolf: I think your RAMBO Ticket is #4382.
Carl S. : While we talk about R2 GUI enhancement, do you think it could be easy enough to implement the insert action for the R2 EVENT port. I really want to develop some part of a semi-automatic (user-assisted) testing framework for View. This missing part is really annoying to me and I don't see how I can circumvent it. Any clues for me ? | shadwolf
16-Jan-2010 17:50:19 |
you are right the ticket for my problem is RAMBO Ticket #4382.
i made a picture that can help understand the problem
http://shadwolf.free.fr/drawtext-problems.jpg | meijeru
23-Jan-2010 8:11:14 |
I posted several comments on broken links, to the blog entry announcing the renewal of the website (0449). Is there a better place to put such comments? | Carl Sassenrath
26-Jan-2010 20:24:16 |
Meijeru: Thanks, that's fine for now. The changes are almost complete, and I'll provide a URL for problems. |
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