We should try to protect Marcus's Time (was Re: a new release?

[Paul E. Johnson]

Pietro Terna wrote:
> 
>         Hi all,
> 
>         I think that it would be useful to have a new official release of 
> Swarm
> (i.e. 2.0.2) and may be also a new CD. What about?
> 
>         Pietro
>
People may not be aware of the fact that labor to orchestrate a new cd
is labor subtracted from development effort.

I was in Santa Fe one year ago, when the first batch of CDs were being
made.  Marcus and Alex had a 4 speed cd writer and some press and peel
cd labels that they stomped onto the naked disks. I watched in
amusement, and then horror, as they spent valuable time printing out cds
and labels and beautiful mail address labels. My thought was there ought
to be some assistant doing all that stuff, but alas there was none.  

Looking at the Swarm project from the outside, I think a lot of us
believe there is some large structure of employees who eagerly carry out
all kinds of chores. Everything we ask for has to be done by somebody.
At least in the short term, because Alex and Vladimir have moved on,
that someone is typically going to be Marcus (and whatever help he can
get from Irene or other Swarm Corp staff).  

It is more important for Marcus to be working on the code in Swarm
proper, rather than writing and printing CDs.  Making a new "finalized"
release requires an immense amount of integration.  I've been monitoring
the effort that Marcus has made to make Swarm run on DEC Alpha systems
and the complexity of it is truly astonishing. And that is just one
small slice of his effort. The fact that Swarm now compiles with a
relatively simple GNU configure|make|make install routine on many
platforms is evidence of a great deal of care and knowledge.

As a community, we will all be better off if Marcus has more time to
devote to Swarm software. We could probably do more to protect him from
distractions in swarm-support as well.  We've gotten accustomed to
instant Marcus response, but it would be better over the long run if the
users try to help each other more vigorously and let Marcus deal with
residual problems that users cannot solve among themselves.   

-- 
Paul E. Johnson                         email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science              http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                    Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                  FAX: (785) 864-5700

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