Re: Hmmm.... future of cons?

[Doug Alcorn]

Steven Knight <address@hidden> writes:

> A lot of the pieces are in place for revival.  2.3.1 could be released
> with a minimum of work.  Now that the FSF has savannah.gnu.org set
> up, the Cons project page there would be a very valuable resource for
> managing the project (based on my experience using SourceForge to manage
> SCons).  I also checked in a redesigned Cons web site almost a year ago;
> this could be rolled out hand-in-hand with the announcement of a revived
> Cons project.

I certainly see at least the value of this.  Other than getting 2.3.1
out the door, what's would be the goals of continuing Cons
development?  Is there much more work that needs to be done?  Isn't it
nearly feature complete?

I could devote some amount of time to the project.  I'm a little timid
about saying I'll be "Project Lead".  I do feel comfortable volunteering
for "webmaster" and "Release Manager".  What I see those
entailing are obviously keeping the web site up to date and then
coordinating releases.  What I'm a little afraid of is saying that
I'll be responsible for heading up development.

I think Cons is a great.  I've not used many of the esoteric
functions.  Really only for one project that was a clean C++ code
tree.  I don't run on Win32; although I've run on several Unix
variants.  My current project isn't even Cons based (although I would
really like to convert it).  All that said, I have written (an
re-written) the build system for a fairly large tree in Cons and I'm
pretty good at Perl (I would rate myself at about 7-ish out of 10).

I'll also say I don't really understand why Cons had to be re-written
in Python.  I guess it's about the money.  Didn't the SCons project
get money to re-write it in Python to be part of the Software
Carpentry project?  Was that the only reason?  Were there technical
reasons for abandoning the Perl code base?  I don't really know
Python.  I've only done a smidgen of work in it.  However, I don't see
anything that Python does that Perl doesn't do just as easily.  True,
the syntax is more "homogeneous"; however, TMTOWTDI is one of the
things I like most about Perl.  Anyway, this seems like a perfect
example of Joel Spolsky's Rule Number One[1].

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
-- 
 (__) Doug Alcorn - Unix/Linux/Web Developing
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