State of Development

Hi all,

I'm sure you're all wondering what the heck is going on with  
development and why there are so many open tickets.  Hopefully this  
email will answer those questions for you.

REST Development
======================
First, I've found the REST work to be significantly more complicated  
than I'd feared.  The plumbing is nearly all done and the majority of  
the functionality is now available, but there's still the painful and  
lengthy process of converting the internals from using the old xmlrpc- 
style classes to the newer and much cleaner REST-style classes.

Release Status
=================
Given how long I've been out in the wilderness on this, the fact that  
I don't know how long this conversion will take, and the rate at  
which tickets have been piling up, I've decided to put off this  
conversion and do a release instead.

Starting today, I'm refocusing on getting 0.24.0 out the door as soon  
as possible.  I'll have a more complete idea of what'll be in it by  
next week, but at this point it'll include the environment work I did  
a while back plus as many tickets as I can reasonably fix in the next  
week or two.  This will be the misspiggy release, so by around Monday  
you should have some idea of what tickets I'm planning on fixing in  
this release.  I'll probably also create another intermediate release  
and start assigning tickets to that, which will also include the REST  
work when I finally get it done.

I was initially planning on rolling back to the last known-good  
state, but in assessing the current state, I don't think that's  
necessary.  We've mostly gotten plumbing done without hooking it into  
anything, which means that we would just be releasing the old  
functionality along-side the new plumbing, which shouldn't have any  
affect at all, other than making my life easier.

I *really* hope to get this release out in less than two weeks:  One  
week of ticket-closing, and one week of testing.  Apparently the git  
repo is kinda hosed right now, but it'll be working again by Monday.   
If you're in a position to help test, please start testing on Monday.

Ticket Management
=================
I've mentioned this a few times, but I'm still looking for help from  
the community to manage tickets.  I appear to have really let the  
open tickets pile up, and  I'm having a hard time keeping on top of  
the list of unreviewed tickets.  If anyone is interested in helping  
out, this would be a great place to start, and there are tickets  
ranging from trivially easy to fantastically complicated, so we can  
find the right challenge for just about anyone.

I've also been considering putting a bounty on some of the tickets.   
I'm a bit broke at the moment, but some of the tickets have the right  
combination of annoyance and simplicity that it might be worth some  
money to get rid of them.  Is anyone interested in this?  If so,  
please email me personally, and, I guess, let me know what it would  
actually take to get you interested.

Would others be interested in putting their own bounty on tickets?   
Do you have a feature request or bug that's just killing you that  
you'd be willing to pay a little or a lot of money to have fixed?   
Hopefully the same bounty system would work for you.

Errata
========
This is more Reductive Labs than Puppet, but it's at least worth  
pointing out.  I've recently been joined by two partners, Andrew  
Shafer and Shane Olson.  Neither of them is at the company full time,  
but hopefully I'll be able to afford to bring them on full-time  
soon.  My big hope is that their help will allow me to make the  
product even better for all of you and to develop both Puppet and the  
tools around it, like PuppetShow and Runnels, with a little more vigour.

Conclusion
===============
The summary here, of course, is that REST is delayed for a while, but  
I'm hoping to get a release out relatively soon with the features  
I've already developed (including support for multiple environments)  
along with any critical open tickets.  I'm also still looking for  
community help in managing tickets, and I'd love someone to help  
document features as I add them (James Turnbull has been doing a  
great job of picking my brain and documenting the results, as an  
example).

I should be posting more in the coming days, covering functionality  
you should expect to see in this release.

Feel free to contact me directly if you have any concerns.

  --
  I object to doing things that computers can do.  --Olin Shivers
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  Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com