Re: [Beanshell-users] The sad state of Java scripting

Indeed ! It is fantastic to hear such great news about the current and 
future of BeanShell.
However, I would like to support the idea of improving what we have now.  In 
the near future.
Considering a realistic timeframe ... I would estimate "realistically" that 
even under ideal situations we couldn't expect a Beanshell 3.0 for atleast 
another 2 years ... maybe more.   3-5 may be realistic if 3.0 is not even 
out of the planning stages yet.   Maybe I'm mis-calculating, but looking at 
other projects of this nature, I think that a reasonable estimate given no 
actual other facts.  (Gallery, is a great example, which took about 3 years 
to produce Gallery 2.0 although the published 'estimate' was 6 months ... 
and that was many people working on it).  No hurry, that would be great. 
I'm very happy to hear that's what's being planned.  I literally "cant wait" 
for it to happen.

But in the mean time ... we have a 2.0b4 version, that while "stable" has a 
lot of room for bug fixes, and apparently people willing to do them
(myself included), but no way to get them in.  Requests for submitting 
patches have been ignored (to my knowledge), even the 2.05b version is 
alluded to months ago but not to be found anywhere I know of ...

I'd even be excited about a branch that is not "officially" supported but 
that can be contributed to ... atleast some place to contribute "bug fixes 
only" and let the real geniuses focus on the next version while at the same 
time us mere mortal users some place we can contribute and look for fixes. 
By splitting the workload between these two branches we could revitalize 
community support for BeanShell and improve what we already have without 
distracting from the next generation work.

Now I know its not trivial ... someone (or group) has to be in charge of 
examining patches, testing them and making sure that they don't break 
things.   I am no expert in this specific  process ... although I am well 
experienced in software development ... but I am guessing all it would take 
is an "official blessing" to someone or group to go ahead and setup a branch 
somewhere to do this.  Maybe its harder then that ?  I don't know.  I would 
certainly be willing to volunteer some time and skills to this effort of a 
"bug fix only" branch to BeanShell ... But I'm not sure I want to go to the 
effort of even fixing bugs myself unless there is some way to "publish" 
these fixes ... because my software would likely start to rely on these 
fixes, and if they (or equivalent fixes) were not incorporated into the 
mainstream BeanShell distribution I could never upgrade.   I think that is 
the point of open source ...

-David Lee
[email protected]



>
> Thanks for letting us know where BeanShell stands.
>
> What would you think of putting BeanShell 2.0b4 into a fairly open
> subversion repository and letting us users check in bug fixes?  I can tell
> you the downside, which is that if we fix bugs in BeanShell 2.0, users 
> won't
> be willing to move to 3.0 until it reaches the same level of stability. 
> But
> that is the idea of open source, right?  That users can choose the best
> supported code base.
>
>
>
> Patrick Niemeyer wrote:
>>
>> I understand the frustration and I apologize for not responding to
>> the list more frequently.  The problem with a language project like
>> this is that it places a very high demand for time on a very few
>> people and things have to come together for there to be a lot of
>> visible progress.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> I have continued to make plans for how we're going to approach
>> BeanShell 3.0.  I want the next release to be a significant
>> refactoring that rebases BeanShell on a newer Java version and makes
>> it much more accessible and easier to work on for everyone.
>>
>
> -- 
> View this message in context: 
> http://www.nabble.com/The-sad-state-of-Java-scripting-tf3664576.html#a10247326
> Sent from the BeanShell - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>
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