Re: A new newsgroup?

[glen e. p. ropella]

> I assume this means you'll be placing a new version of the appropriate 
> packages on the ftp site. When will this be done? I was going to fix all 
> the little bugs by hand, but if you are going to put a fixed version up, 
> I might as well just use it.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John Eikenberry
> address@hidden

Well, I didn't really mean that we would be releasing
a new version any time soon.  I just meant that we wouldn't
begin advertising the existence of Swarm 1.0.0 to the rest
of the world until we were fairly sure there were no critical
flaws.  Now, that said, we might get a chance to go to a 
1.0.1 in the source distrib before SwarmFest.  And we will
probably get a 1.0.1 of the docs and the apps pretty soon.
But, if you're looking for a "fixed" version of the source,
then you may not get one till SwarmFest.

This seems like a good time to explain that the presence
of a swarmdocs-1.0.1 will not imply the existence of a
swarm-1.0.1.  The version numbering system we're adopting
will have a version number for the source distribution,
the documentation, and the apps packages.  The apps 
package will be further subdividable into a version number
for each individual application.  All these version numbers
will be independently incrementable.

For example, right now, swarmapps-1.0.0 contains:
  heatbugs-1.0.0, template-1.0.0, market-1.0.0, mousetrap-1.0.0,
hello-world-1.0.0, and tutorial-1.0.0.  And, at any point,
a new heatbugs may be release that is named 1.0.1.  But, the
new heatbugs may not provide enough impetus to release a completely
new swarmapps package.  So, heatbugs-1.0.1 would be distributed
stand-alone and the swarmapps-1.0.0 would continue to contain
the heatbugs-1.0.0.  Then when enough of the apps had changed
by large enough amounts, then we will repackage the latest 
revisions of the apps into a swarmapps-1.0.1 (or, if things change
radically enough, like a new app gets added, it will be 1.1.0).

What this means is that there must be some mechanism for tracking
which app goes with which source dist and which docs go with which
source dist.  Well, we haven't quite worked that out, yet.  But,
it will happen.  And, when it does, it will provide an easily 
adaptable mechanism for tracking the support software dependencies
as well (like which versions of Tcl/Tk work with which Swarm source
distributions).

We also are open to the idea of distributing different libraries
independently as they get upgraded.  Once the proper interfaces
are in place for each library, then Swarm, itself will be 
analyzable into separate library version numbers.  But, this
capability hinges on having clean interfaces, which we don't
have for simtools, tkobjc, analysis, or space.

glen