[ClojureCLR] seeking clarity on status & a request

[David Miller]

The recent survey on ClojureCLR revealed concerns about viability of
and confusion about the status of ClojureCLR and its relation to
Clojure, clojure-dev, clojure/core. See
http://clojureclr.blogspot.com/2011/11/survey-says-viability-is-number-one.html.
One action item there is: Ask Rich Hickey and Clojure/core to clarify
their position and/or plans re ClojureCLR.

Actually, I don't need much help with that. This ML is about mainline
Clojure, the contrib libs, ClojureScript. There is little expertise
or interest related to ClojureCLR. Clojure/core is "the core
development team for Clojure itself". Clojure/core has no interest in
ClojureCLR at this time. (To summarize a conversation I had with a
senior member of the core at the conj: If we need Clojure on the CLR,
we'll be sure to give you a call.) From this one can easily conclude
that ClojureCLR is not a part of "Clojure itself", at this time.

I don't have a problem with this. However, I do feel people should
not be misled about the status of ClojureCLR, that people shouldn't be
waiting for some 'official' status anytime soon. If that precludes
some people from using it -- well, that appears to be a theoretical
concern at best at this point. Community will have to come from the
more casual user.

I have two requests.


First, I'd like help drafting a statement regarding the status of
ClojureCLR, to be included in the README and on the wiki in the repo.
Here's a draft to shoot at:

---

"ClojureCLR in an implementation of the Clojure programming language
targeting Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR).

"The ClojureCLR project was sanctioned initially by Rich Hickey. It
closely tracks the development of Clojure. It is developed under the
same license (Eclipse Public License 1.0) as Clojure. All
contributors are required to have signed a Contributor's Agreement to
the main Clojure project; all contributors to this project thereby
assign joint copyright on the work to Rich Hickey for future inclusion
in Clojure.

"The ClojureCLR project is *NOT* a project under the auspices of
Clojure-dev (https://github.com/clojure and http://dev.clojure.org);
is not a Clojure-contrib project; and is not under supervision by
Clojure/core (http://clojure.com/)."

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Second, I'd like a home for ClojureCLR. Right now, the repo is under
Rich's name at github. It was not moved to the clojure group's repos
on github (taken by many to be the defining characteristic of
'official'). To move this thing forward, I need to start additional
projects for translating contrib libs, doing VS extensions, etc. I do
not want to do this monolithically (cf. old clojure/contrib), so I
need to be able to create repos. I do not want to do this under my
name -- this already smells too much like a hobby project -- and
certainly I can't do that under Rich's account. So I request that
someone official--clojure-dev, clojure/core, Rich, ? -- create a
clojure-clr or ClojureCLR or clojureclr group on github and give me
permission to create repos. As is current practice, no code will go
into repos here that is not covered by CA with Rich.

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Thanks for any help on the above.

-David