On 2021-01-11 10:14:54 Rony G. Flatscher wrote: > On February 24th 2021, it will be seven (!) years since the last official > release of ooRexx took place, believe it or not! > > People who do not follow this list or the ooRexx code updates on > Sourceforge will think, that maintenance, let alone development, of ooRexx > has ceased seven years ago! :( > > This puts pressure on those people in organisations/businesses who use > Rexx/ooRexx but are faced with demands of replacements with more modern, > maintained and continuously developed programming languages like Python, > Ruby and the like. > > Also, people who suggest to allow usage of ooRexx in > organisations/businesses will usually get turned down as ooRexx is outdated > and not maintained, so why using it? Learning about a beta version does not > help as everyone knows that beta means error-prone, unstable software and > the like, and as a result organisations/businesses usually prohibit usage > and deployment of beta software. > > As ooRexx 5.0 beta has been in an excellent condition for many years, it > could have been released years ago! ooRexx 5.0 beta adds a wealth of great > new features, in addition very notable speed improvements and fixes many > bugs of the seven years old ooRexx 4.2, the last official release of > ooRexx! > > As no show-stoppers are present I think that the current version of ooRexx > 5.0 beta should be released ASAP as is. The only thing needed would be a > new package that is declared to be the release package! > > Is there a will for a release? If so, can the release be done by February > 24th 2021? > > ---rony > > P.S.: Also, once a release is done, I would suggest to make sure to create > a yearly (!) release, even if they are only microreleases! This will signal > ongoing maintenance and development to outsiders/users of ooRexx, which has > been the case for all those past years (but lacking releases this was not > communicated successfully to outsiders/users of ooRexx). > > P.P.S.: In today's world the release cycles are critical to public > reception of the healthiness of (software) projects it seems, probably the > main reason why Linux creates even twice a year a release, but also > Java/OpenJDK and others.
Another reason that ooRexx will be viewed as outdated is that, unlike other popular scripting languages, it provides support only for 7-bit ASCII, severely limiting its use globally. Leslie -- _______________________________________________ Oorexx-devel mailing list Oorexx-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/oorexx-devel