I was in the military. You learn an important rule - never volunteer. In fact, when someone asks for volunteers, step backwards to leave some poor schmuck who stands still a volunteer.
While I believe that philosophy has its place, it is usually not in the open source community. A few days ago I started a thread in the p6.internals list, after being prompted by an ICU developer, to reconsider our use of it, in its current state, for our unicode support.
It is the thread that will not die. Everyone seems to have an opinion. But Dan's position is very clear - we will provide unicode support with parrot. What wasn't originally clear though is that the user doesn't need to use it if they don't want.
So I started a new thread today. Basically people need to stop talking about what we should do and volunteer to do something about it. There is nothing saying we are locked into ICU - heck, even Dan would like to see it gone, but we need an alternative. I am not volunteering for that - even if I had the skills.... well maybe if I had the skills.
Fearing inaction, I suggested that a representative from each platform that Parrot is building on checkout the latest stable release, build it, and report anything "special" required to get it to work. This should make things a lot easier if we stay with ICU or even if we continue to support it in addition to another library.
I volunteered for the Cygwin platform since I appear the only person on the planet using Cygwin and Parrot.
Which branch and for how long? And may I ask what your final rank was? Just curious.
