[IronPython] Curious about the development cycle and community involvement

[David DiCato]

Very cool - it's always fulfilling for us to see this level of enthusiasm from our users. Unfortunately, the legal barriers to our accepting external contributions are still very much there, as explained in the FAQ (http://ironpython.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=FAQ). As for the CodePlex Foundation, my (limited) understanding is that it could only help the situation, but the organization is brand-new, and we'll have to wait for it to become more established. If you'd like more specific legal information, I'd be happy to relay your questions to the right people.

In the meantime, simply reporting issues you're having with IronPython is one of the best ways to help us improve it. I saw the issue you referenced in [3], and I'm curious if you've run into any other problems through the course of your development. In general, we assign a higher priority to bugs that block a specific application, so you can still push the project forwards without actually writing the patches yourself.

Finally, regarding our dev cycle, I'll refer you to our IronPython 2.6 Roadmap (http://ironpython.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?title=2.6%20Release%20Plan) for our scheduling estimates. The only caveat here is that we are also doing a RC 2 release, which will push back the final release date accordingly.

- David

-----Original Message-----
From: users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com [mailto:users-bounces at lists.ironpython.com] On Behalf Of tyler at monkeypox.org
Sent: Monday, October 12, 2009 8:03 PM
To: users at lists.ironpython.com
Subject: [IronPython] Curious about the development cycle and community involvement

Howdy, I'm a CPython developer by trade, but I've been watching IronPython evolve and have recently started playing around with 2.6rc1 for a number of smaller projects [1][2].

While evaluating IronPython, I've run across a couple of issues [3] that I think I'm capable of helping to fix but I notice that there's this note in the FAQ regarding external contributions:

	Does the IronPython Team accept back source contributions into the IronPython and DLR codebases?

I'm curious as to whether this is still the case, FePy looks somewhat...
sleepy/out-of-date. How does the CodePlex Foundation fit into this? Does it change things?

I know for some other projects (Mono comes to mind) they require an
MIT/X11 to commit to core and some paperwork with Novell (presumably so they have their bases covered for commercializing the IP). Is this something that might help open up IronPython to community contributions?


Furthermore, to the tune of the "development cycle" it's quite unclear from the site how long the "release candidate" cycle is going to be before the final version of 2.6.0 is released; how long are these cycles typically?


I'm really excited about the prospects of incorporating IronPython 2.6 into more of my projects (particularly on top of Mono), but I'd like to able to contribute back where I can to push the project forward.


Appreciate any feedback/thoughts :)


Cheers,
-R. Tyler Ballance

[1] http://github.com/rtyler/IronWatin
[2] http://unethicalblogger.com/posts/2009/10/crazysnake_ironpython_and_java_just_monkeying_around
[3] http://ironpython.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=24533