Parrot (was Re: tpf blog)

[Ovid]

--- Dirk Koopman <djk at tobit.co.uk> wrote:

> > 	http://news.perlfoundation.org/
> 
> Is it just me, or has parrot development started again from 
> (more or less) scratch?

As the person who wrote the entry you're referring to, I can promise
you the answer is "no", though I can see the misunderstanding. 
However, that's an excellent question you can post to that blog.
 
> "Chip Salzenberg is working on milestone 1: the design document
> milestone.
<snip>
> "Leo T�tschch is working on milestone 2: the stub implementation
> milestone.
<snip>
> and so on. It appears that parrot development has been going
> on for several years (at least three) and we are now talking
> about milestones 0
> -> 2? Some design documents (is that the lot or are there 
> more to be done)? 
> 
> What on earth is going on?

First, some background.  Parrot has been developing into quite a mature
piece of software.  In order to properly guide that development and
keep people apprised of the development, we added a project manager
(Jesse Vincent) and a grant manager (myself, but then I turned it over
to DavRolskyky).

Part of the problem we faced was that many of the docs were terribly
out of date.  In order for new folks to come in and help, they needed
to know what was going on and that's not an easy task if the software
does something different from the docs.  As a result, when Chip took
over part of DaSugalski's's role, one of our first priorities was
ensuring that the docs accurately reflect what's going on.

Further, by taking care of the foundation, it's much easier to
implement the successive milestones.

To those on the outside, it's easy to think that we're starting from
scratch, but this isn't the case.  We're just cleaning things up a bit
to make moving forward easier.

Cheers,
Ovid

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