Welcome to the Jungerl!

[Chris Pressey]

On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 18:10:02 -0000
Sean Hinde <Sean.Hinde@REDACTED> wrote:

> > On Tue, 25 Feb 2003 00:02:42 -0000
> > Sean Hinde <Sean.Hinde@REDACTED> wrote:
> > 
> > > [...]
> > > I do think this will need some active management from 
> > someone who gets a
> > > kick out of organising things (i.e. defintely not me!) To 
> > be useful for
> > > the widest audience we really need to avoid it becoming 
> > Junkerl.. Like
> > > should we have a new project called
> > > 
> > random_build_tools_which_are_all_useful_but_dont_work_together
> > ?! I guess
> > > the project mailing list is the place to sort these issues out.
> > 
> > I think I disagree, well sorta...
> 
> Well so do I, sorta, as well, and this is where my personality starts to
> split apart.. My natural instinct is towards the chaos model, but the
> manager in me knows what a thin line we tread when we deploy these 2
> week creations into our GSM network that millions of customers rely on.
>
> All that it would take is one major service outage at the wrong time for
> folks to start asking difficult questions (and we do seem to be
> generating a few places who would be happy to see us shut down along the
> way).
> 
> So, to summarise my view, I want the chaos which will generate great
> ideas and cool code, but I want it to always work perfectly and never be
> broken once it works. 
> 
> Hmmmm.
> 
> Sean

I do worry about the "oops-I-was-using-the-Jungerl-version-of-foo"
problem.  I think jerl is probably an adequate first line of defense, and
I liken it to this: you don't install FreeBSD-CURRENT on a production
server, and you don't install Jungerl on a production Erlang node.

In a sense, Jungerl could help make a more stable system: the contribs on
erlang.org are currently a mixed bag.  Some are really old, some are
incomplete but show promise, some are periodic updates from projects with
their own development projects on sourceforge etc.  If many of the
projects that would survive better in Jungerl (ex11 is probably a good
example) were moved to it, the User Contribs area on erlang.org could have
higher overall standards.

(OK, that's maybe a bit of a stretch, but I still think the value of a
project like Jungerl outweighs the risk.)

Maybe all Jungerl modules could be compiled with a tag like
-vsn('JUNGERL') or something to help avoid confusing them with stable
releases?

-Chris