Sunday, March 12, 2006

Oops!

In my previous post, I mentioned the new anyall module. Well, bamboo removed the module from svn, so please ignore the previous post about them.

Author: bamboo
Date: 2006-03-12 15:53:09 -0500 (Sun, 12 Mar 2006)
New Revision: 2167

Removed:
boo/trunk/src/Boo.Lang.Useful
/Functional/
boo/trunk/tests/Boo.Lang.Useful.Tests/Functional/
Log:
any/all were not formally approved and the tests were not passing
When I first checked in anyall.boo, the tests were passing, so I'm not sure what to make of that message. Looks like a minor bugfix I made to the anyall module last night exposed another problem, but I'm not sure if its a problem in Boo or in the module. Since its probably in the module there's no point in trying to debug it. ;)

Rant
What actually bothers me is the first half of the message -- that they weren't formally approved. I don't mind in particular that they were removed because the testcases were failing; its my bad for checking in the minor fix without running the unit tests.

But the first half of his message brings to light one of the most irritating things about Boo development. The major reason I stopped contributing code to Boo in the first place was that patches were just kind of dangling on JIRA with feedback from users, but in general ignored by bamboo. My given-when, Doug's given-when, the BOO-1 custom unit patch, Boo.Lang.Useful contributions, ckknight's optimized for-loop, are just kind of rotting as the codebase gradually change and the patches become out of sync.

Its very depressing--a lot of the people that have attached bugfixes to JIRA issues and contributed modules for Boo.Lang.Useful review that have been ignored in general. Nobody wants to write a patch that doesn't at least get looked at; it feels like a bit of a waste of your time, since the feasability of maintaining your own copy of Boo with the patch is very unlikely.

With SVN access, I was kind of hoping I could change some of that by at least working with the Useful contributions, updating the patches and merging the ones that seem the most popular, but if its going to take formal approval then everything is in the same situation it was before.

But, it is bamboo's baby, so the choice on how to handle the situation is ultimately his. I should probably take a bit of a break from hacking on Boo and find something else to do for awhile.

Sidenote: The one majorly annoying things with RTF input forms on a webpage is that you can't press tab and indent text. Tab has been historically reserved for jumping over hypertext elements in a web page, which means that some editors have simply adopted "indent" and "deindent" buttons on the toolbar.

Blogger doesn't have those.

Kinda hoping that the "threat" of XAML/WinFX encourages better user interface design on the web. XUL is nice but aside from the one Amazon.com XUL browser everyone uses to herald The Coming of The XUL, there's not much else using it.

I pine for the day I can press tab while editing a document in a webpage and stuff works like a real text editor.

2 comments:

Qwertie said...

Hm, boo is a really awesome language. What an odd thing that Bamboo seems not to care about community support. This post is several months old--would you say the situation is still the same?

Unknown said...

Recently bamboo seems to have opened up to community support -- but I don't know if that's because he's realized that generics support won't get done without the community, or what. You could ask him yourself.