[FR-devel] RE: FreeRide

[Curt Hibbs]

Carl Youngblood wrote:
>
> Is it just my faulty perception or does the momentum behind FreeRIDE
> seem to have petered out?  I haven't heard about it for months.

No, the FreeRIDE project is still very much alive.

As with all open source projects, visible progress depends on the available
time that its volunteers have to give. With larger projects the slower times
are masked because some developers are in "high-activity" mode while time of
others is completely consumed by other areas of their lives.

The FreeRIDE project has generated a lot of interest, but has only three or
four active contributors (of which Rich Kilmer and Laurent Julliard have
done the bulk of the work). So, when we all hit our "slow times"
simultaneously, it might look like the momentum has petered out -- but in
this case, let's just view it as a momentary rest.  :-)

There have been a lot of bug fixes to FreeRIDE since its last release, so it
is certainly worth getting the latest code from cvs.

Before we do our next release, I want to get the debugger working under
Windows (it works on Linux), but I'm still having trouble finding time to
work on it. You probably read Rich Kilmer's response already -- he plans to
add real project management support next. And Hal Fulton is planning to add
support for refactoring and, I believe, he is giving a talk on it at this
year's Ruby Conference.

And, as always, if we can get more people interested in helping out with the
FreeRIDE development, the progress will be much faster!  :-)

Curt