3.6 Release Experience, Parrot Developer Summit, Roadmap Goals

[Jonathan "Duke" Leto]

Howdy,

Firstly, thanks for a solid release and giving necessary feedback on
that process.

> Let's face it.  Our project's members like to develop *on* and *for* Linux.
>  We react to working on or (especially) for OSes other than Linux as either
> being told to floss (Darwin, the BSDs) or having teeth pulled (Windows).

Just to clarify my take on this:

I do most of my development on Ubuntu, but I am committed to make Parrot work
on any Free/Open source OS (which notably lacks caring about Windows or OS X).

I am the one who set up our *BSD smokers and will gladly test any patches for
*BSD portability, or in other words, I guess I enjoy flossing.

> * People *state* that it would be good to have more Parrot developers on
> Windows, but they really would like those developers to be *somebody else*.

If there are so few people on Windows wanting to do Parrot development, this
should lead us to ask how important supporting Windows is.

> * Given the number of us who use Macs, you would expect many more
> Darwin/i386 smoke reports than we actually get.  But long-standing
> corner-case bugs on Darwin go undiagnosed.

Again, see the above question.

> Our mantra: "Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at all dynamic languages."
>  The reality: "Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at all dynamic languages,
> provided you're on Linux."

The real reality: "Parrot is a virtual machine aimed at running all
dynamic languages on platforms that our devs have access to."

My question to parrot devs:

Which platforms are most important? Because surely, there will be times when we
have to choose between not getting anything released and releasing a feature
that only works on a subset of our currently supported platforms.

Duke


-- 
Jonathan "Duke" Leto <jonathan at leto.net>
Leto Labs LLC
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