Hi guys, Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent here for a few months. Last year we got a baby, then we moved back to Europe. I decided to leave Apple a few months ago to achieve one of my dreams: work on a startup, in part so that I would be flexible in my time and be able to keep hacking on MacRuby. Believe it or not, in the near future I should have less pressure on myself and therefore I should have the time to hack on MacRuby again. I will happily resume maintaining MacRuby, like I did for the last 5 years. MacRuby is quite stable right now so the maintenance burden is less significant than before. Also, during my absence, Watson did a great job of smashing all sorts of incoming bugs, if he keeps up he will likely become the #1 committer of the project :). Mark Rada spent a lot of time triaging bugs and writing patches. And Josh Ballanco kept the IRC channel in activity. It's like the project never slept. BTW, the 0.11 release actually does exist, you can find it on the GitHub page. The release notes are still missing, but I will take care of this (we need to automate the whole process). One thing that people are worried about is that the Objective-C GC is being deprecated in Mountain Lion. That's not a surprise given that the emphasis is on ARC now. As Apple generally (but not always) removes deprecated APIs in the next release cycle, MacRuby needs to be changed this year to not depend on the GC anymore. I have been experimenting with different alternate memory models for MacRuby on my spare time, and one of them seems to work well, modulo a few leaks. It's similar to ARC in design (but it has a different implementation). I have been working on a MacRuby app with friends using the new code, so far so good. I will merge my branch with GitHub as soon as it's stable, with a few other improvements. That should happen before Mountain Lion ships, so no worries, we should be fine. What can you do to help? Well, keep using MacRuby :) Report bugs. Write cool samples and submit them on GitHub. Write tutorials covering a feature of OSX that was challenging to program in MacRuby. For the more technically-inclined, you can check the tickets, try creating patches, etc. Laurent
Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent here for a few months. Last year we got a baby, then we moved back to Europe. I decided to leave Apple a few months ago to achieve one of my dreams: work on a startup, in part so that I would be flexible in my time and be able to keep hacking on MacRuby.
<3
BTW, the 0.11 release actually does exist, you can find it on the GitHub page. The release notes are still missing, but I will take care of this (we need to automate the whole process).
I’m pretty sure Git can give you a nice log. I forgot the command, though… Anyone else? Eloy
You can also use git log or GitHub: https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/0.10...0.11 - Matt On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Eloy Duran <eloy.de.enige@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent here for a few months. Last year we got a baby, then we moved back to Europe. I decided to leave Apple a few months ago to achieve one of my dreams: work on a startup, in part so that I would be flexible in my time and be able to keep hacking on MacRuby.
<3
BTW, the 0.11 release actually does exist, you can find it on the GitHub page. The release notes are still missing, but I will take care of this (we need to automate the whole process).
I’m pretty sure Git can give you a nice log. I forgot the command, though… Anyone else?
Eloy _______________________________________________ MacRuby-devel mailing list MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
(new troller here...) I use something like this for creating Git change-logs formatted for Confluence. You could easily modify it for other types of output. git log --name-status --no-merges --format="* %aN on %ad, %h, %s" --date=short --since="1 week ago" You can also use diff ranges (e.g. HEAD^^..HEAD) instead of --since. -- Jason Rogers On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 13:29, Matt Aimonetti <mattaimonetti@gmail.com> wrote:
You can also use git log or GitHub: https://github.com/MacRuby/MacRuby/compare/0.10...0.11
- Matt
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Eloy Duran <eloy.de.enige@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent here for a few months. Last year we got a baby, then we moved back to Europe. I decided to leave Apple a few months ago to achieve one of my dreams: work on a startup, in part so that I would be flexible in my time and be able to keep hacking on MacRuby.
<3
BTW, the 0.11 release actually does exist, you can find it on the GitHub page. The release notes are still missing, but I will take care of this (we need to automate the whole process).
I’m pretty sure Git can give you a nice log. I forgot the command, though… Anyone else?
Eloy _______________________________________________ MacRuby-devel mailing list MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
_______________________________________________ MacRuby-devel mailing list MacRuby-devel@lists.macosforge.org http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macruby-devel
I have been experimenting with different alternate memory models for
MacRuby on my spare time, and one of them seems to work well, modulo a few leaks. It's similar to ARC in design (but it has a different implementation). I have been working on a MacRuby app with friends using the new code, so far so good. I will merge my branch with GitHub as soon as it's stable, with a few other improvements. That should happen before Mountain Lion ships, so no worries, we should be fine.
This is great news. Does this mean that without a dependency to GC, MacRuby code will now in principle run under iOS? Cheers Frank
On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:20 AM, Laurent Sansonetti <laurent.sansonetti@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent here for a few months.
[ Looks at Calendar] I think it was closer to 6 months, actually, but hey - who's counting! :-) In any case, any sign of Laurent is always nice to see (if Matt's message accomplished nothing else, it did that), and I'm sure this project will welcome any and all contributions from him, assuming his new startup does not end up consuming him entirely despite his most optimistic predictions (startups tend to do this - I've done a couple myself). On a more pointed note, I also hope that his message does not lead to false expectations on anyone's part that things can or will simply go back to "the way things were" because that's simply not going to happen. As both Matt and Laurent's messages point out, things have changed and they've actually been changed for awhile now; we cannot (as much as we might like to) run the clock backwards, substituting nostalgia for pragmatism. I would therefore strongly encourage anyone who was inspired enough by Matt's message to contemplate stepping up and trying to lead the project more as a community effort, and let me just underline the word community there again, to go back and re-read the bullet points in it. Then by all means step up rather than simply going back to sleep and waiting for someone else to part the Red Sea and lead the project out of Egypt! :) The goals Matt outlined are all absolutely worth pursuing if this project genuinely wishes to have a future, and they will remain worth pursuing whether or not 0.11 gets eventually released as a binary installer or the issues around GC get resolved such that MacRuby continues to run happily in an ARC-centric new world. While those may seem the most pressing issues in front of you now, and I encourage you to set some deadlines and target goals around them rather than hoping that they happen "eventually and somehow", they are nonetheless relatively minor points in comparison to the overall "what does MacRuby want to BE when it grows up?" sorts of questions. If anyone feels like those questions can or should now be put back to bed, let me be the first to correct such fallacious thinking! I've been saying for some time now how much this project truly needs to get past the manner in which it was started and transition to being a community-driven effort since all the historical hand-wringing around "what will we do without Apple?!" is just as non-productive and likely to end in stagnation and [project] death as is hoping that one person will ride in from the desert to do all the work and you can just stand around and fan him with palm leaves or something. Those sorts of "solutions" do not scale and only lead to single-point-of-failure scenarios. In the software industry, this is referred to as "bus insurance": "What do we do if ${someKeyPerson} gets run over by a bus?" This project has never really had any bus insurance, and the last 6 months have only underscored how much it really needs to have some. Matt's message has also inspired other folks to start weighing in on this topic, as this article demonstrates, and I can only strongly encourage such discussion to continue. I may not agree with all of the points Jonathan makes in that article (among other things, MacPorts is still very much alive and growing and has not been "replaced" by Homebrew at all) but I agree with his assertion that MacRuby has now reached the stage where it needs to stand on its own, and among other things that means it needs (I'll just keep saying this over and over again until you all go insane) community leadership. It needs a developer team that is not dominated by any one company or individual but is broad-based enough to not constantly send the subliminal but strong message that it's just one person or sponsorship arrangement away from the death that some other Ruby distributions have suffered. That is not simply a lesson for MacRuby but one for ANY open source project, and one I've observed over and over again through the decades (yes, I'm that old) that I have been observing and participating in the phenomenon that is Open Source Development. Has anyone ever heard of Debian Linux? Of course you have - it's been a hugely influential distribution, spawning any number of sub-distributions, and is one of the most well-run and respected OSS projects on the Internet today. Do you know how it got its name? From the concatenation of Debra Lynn and Ian Murdock, the latter being the principle founder / manifesto writer for the project. Ian has long since moved on to other things, and he only personally ran the project for 3 years, but his project lives on because it built up a community and focused on infrastructure and tools for collaboration to a degree that few had ever seen before (its package collection still being one of the best and most professionally organized things I've ever seen in the OSS world). The project survived the absence of its founder and went onto even greater heights after his departure, in other words, and I think that's both somewhat poetic and how things should be! Keep pushing. Find a mountain you all want to climb (as a project team) and then resolve to climb it together. The fun part is the journey, not simply standing on top of the mountain. If that were not true, everyone would simply travel to the top by helicopter. :-) - Jordan
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@apple.com> wrote:
On Apr 6, 2012, at 4:20 AM, Laurent Sansonetti <laurent.sansonetti@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, I'm still alive :) As you may have noticed, I have been absent here for a few months.
[ Looks at Calendar] I think it was closer to 6 months, actually, but hey - who's counting! :-)
[...] Jordan, I think you made it clear, several times, that Apple is not interested in developing MacRuby anymore [1]. There is no need to add another layer of unnecessary information here. We got it. If you guys want to contribute development time, then it's a different discussion. You have a lot of nice ideas, but talk is cheap. Laurent [1] You also know that's the reason I left, so lamenting on my temporary absence is somehow hypocritical, so say the least. I think that you know that free software works best when developers are employed. :)
participants (6)
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Eloy Duran
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Frank Illenberger
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Jason Rogers
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Jordan K. Hubbard
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Laurent Sansonetti
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Matt Aimonetti