[For some reason, the original letter never arrived at this list, so I am posting it again. Anyway, I agree with Pavel that it may well be that currently in the summer everyone is simply on vacation, so we should perhaps discuss this in September further.]
Dear Mozart users, on the hackers list, we recently had a Mozart Enhancement Proposal (MEP) submitted and accepted -- without any discussion at all and with only a single vote. I feel that there may be a problem in the way MEPs are currently handled. I hope in discussing this matter here we can perhaps find a better approach. The MEP (http://www.mozart-oz.org/meps/mep-0103.html) rules presently state "To introduce a MEP, the author writes a draft and posts it to hackers at mozart-oz.org." My first question is whether it is a good idea to post a new MEP to Mozart hackers instead of Mozart users. Actually, I doubt that more than half of the eight members of the Mozart Board are at all subscribed to the hackers list (please correct me if I am wrong), so it may be that they never see this submission. Also, if we want that the Mozart community discusses the proposal, then why not submitting it to the Mozart list to which most likely most readers are subscribed? However, it may even be that not all members of the Mozart Board are subscribed to or are regularily reading the users list. After all, few of them are posting here. So, perhaps any MEP should also be send to all board members directly by email in order to give them at least a chance to take part in the process. One could argue that Mozart Board members which are not following any Mozart mailing list at all are perhaps not interested any more. I would certainly not go that far. Nevertheless, perhaps the board members could be asked, say, once a year whether they want to carry on with this this duty. I feel Mozart has the best chance to survive if we welcome everyone willing to contribute with open arms. In the past, there have been cases where potential developers/contributers where driven away, simply because there existed no official way for them to add what they missed (e.g., I have in mind past proposals concerning Unicode support). Meanwhile we have an official way (MEPs). However, we should make sure that this process is actually working. Moreover, in my personal view it would be best if potential contributers can get the feeling they are indeed welcome -- if the Mozart Board appears not to care than this may have the opposite effect. Best Torsten PS: I sent this email directly to all board members, just in case. Apologies if they receive this message twice. PPS: Messages from the hackers list related to the last MEP On Jun 6, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Yves Jaradin wrote:
We at UCL would like to introduce a while loop construct in Mozart of the form while Expression do Statement end
On Jul 4, 2008, at 1:27 PM, Yves Jaradin wrote:
Since my last email about this didn't produce any negative feedback, I assume that we can move forward. Therefore, here is a formal MEP to introduce while loops.
On Jul 22, 2008, at 4:17 PM, Raphael Collet wrote:
This MEP procedure really looks like a joke. Apparently nobody cares...
On Jul 22, 2008, at 4:44 PM, Torsten Anders wrote:
When I read your proposal some time ago, I felt that instead of having only a single additional looping control structure, I would *much more* prefer having macros. These would then users allow to come up with their own control structures like while (besides other things). I kept silent, because I also know that it is rather unlikely that macros are added anytime soon. We discussed it before, various people agreed that it would be a nice thing to have, but it would imply substantial work to realise it. When Olivier Tonglet implemented Oz macros for his thesis, he shied away from actually touching the Oz parser, and it is unlikely that anyone else does it.
-- Torsten Anders Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research University of Plymouth Office: +44-1752-586219 Private: +44-1752-558917 http://strasheela.sourceforge.net http://www.torsten-anders.de _________________________________________________________________________________ mozart-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users
