Ensemble community venues

[Clint Byrum]

Excerpts from Gustavo Niemeyer's message of Thu Apr 14 10:12:48 -0700 2011:
> FWIW, the conversation with Clint followed on privately, and since
> this may look a bit terse either way, I'll expand on the idea a bit
> more in the public forum to see if it's sensible or not.

I actually meant to reply publicly. OOPS!

> 
> > Agreed, this was overly dramatic.
> >
> > That said, I'm trying to address the general reluctance to release,
> > not so much the specific case of the hooks being renamed.
> 
> The Ensemble project has a couple of months of working at all, so it's
> usually improper for such a young project to be put in an explicit
> constraint regarding which changes will happen and where.  At this
> point it's much more critical that we detect important problems and
> try to fix them in a timely basis so that new users won't find them
> than promising stability.  The more we wait, the more we'll have to
> fix, and the more users will get confused with bad behavior or bad
> conventions we introduce.  That said, this isn't a statement that
> we'll break the format every week either.  To our credit, we've had
> pretty much no changes in the past, with a single exception which we
> talked about in this thread, and we don't envision further changes
> either.  If changes are made at all, they will be debated, and the
> fact we'll be breaking formulas or not we'll always be taken in
> consideration.
> 
> Does that sound like a more reasonable background?  Does it still feel bad?
> 

That sounds ok for now.

At some point, the debate will be dominated by the work that has already
been done and would have to be changed, which right now, is very small,
but I hope will grow quite rapidly over the next couple of months.

This also doesn't address the lack of a release. Versions typically help
developers and users know whether a bug thats reported has been fixed or
a behavior has been changed, and helps them reproduce issues. We don't
have users, so this is not that important yet. At some point very soon,
it will likely be very obvious that its time to release. I personally
think that time is now, but I seem to be in the minority and so will
let go of that issue.