Tom;

Yeah, but its release cycles are getting longer. There's going to be
an organized hacking session to get the next release out in the next
several months or something like that.

Yeah. From what I gather people have been hard at work and there have been updates to the CVS but no actual releases.

I'd rather have seen a "release early, release often" cycle. I feel it's clear the community is quite good at stress-testing new things so even for a single update (I'm thinking of file IO here at the moment) a release might be worthwhile. I suspect it's Ge who has to make that that call and that he's been unable to do so due to the crazy situation around Smule. I don't mean that as criticism *at all* because I'm so happy for Ge, we should all grab our chances while we have tthem. People can get a version with some updates from CVS but personally I'd rather not and I'd rather stay compattible in the interest of non-confusing discussions on the list; some of the concepts we are dealing with are complex enough as they are.

For another thing this release has been interesting to me because we got some new techniques from the community that basically count as new features to me, I'm particularly thinking about casting "up and down" and having what amounts to "duck typing" that way, provided we are sure of what we are doing.

Still, it might be a good idea to think about enabling other people besides Ge to push out releases when some new feature is done. I suppose stability is a issue there but let's remember that we have a community that's quite good at finding bugs and issues, then pinpointing them. I can guarantee the DEV's that we are much better at thinking of things they hadn't considered than they are ;¬) and in the bad old days even replacing code would crash and we still had fun while pinpointed bugs are easy to fix. To paraphrase; safe ChucK is boring ChucK.

On the other hand; we have slacked a little in adding documented bugs to the Wiki. Let's make it easer on the DEV's for these weeks/months by having all bugs in one place. Let's bring this up to date; http://wiki.cs.princeton.edu/index.php/ChucK/Bugs/Release

Yours,
Kas.

PS, kindly imagine a dozen or so "IMHO's" in the above.