Ballpark, about when is Perl6 going to be released?

Sooner, if you help.

...schedules seem to be a very good thing to have. Else, you end up with feature-itis and a stable product is never established.

Non sequitur.

Saying "April 2005" had absolutely no bearing on whether Larry will need surgery in 2003. Promising Apocalypse 12 on October 31 had absolutely no bearing on whether roles solved a real problem in OO.

Someone has to identify the features to program. Someone has to program them. Setting an arbitrary date has no bearing on that.

Ok, I'll jump. How *do* I get involved? I'm currently jumping around with various ideas in my head, mostly all for personal fulfillment, and working on something more important to the community *is* what I am looking for. My previous involvement in open source projects is minimal, I've attempted to start something on sourceforge before, but nothing really came of it -- mainly because a lot of cool things can't happen while flying solo.

Perl6 is very important to Perl, of course, mainly because it straightens out the OO model enough to where it can start to really gain widespread acceptance in places Perl can't normally go. It's the third-stage rocket booster to Perl greatness, essentially.

Let me know what I can do, and I'm there. I have some fairly sharp design and development skills (IMHO), experience across a wide set of languages -- yet I'm not exactly sure how the process works. Helping would be awesome though.

It's the third-stage rocket booster to Perl greatness, essentially.

Well, just don't tell anyone the third stage is a nuclear fission rocket, eh? (We're also working a fusion drive for Perl 7, but that's always going to be 20 years away...)

As for helping out, most folks just lurk on perl6-language and perl6-internals for a while until they get up to speed. There are various documents on dev.perl.org, but you have to read them as works in progress, especially the mailing list archives.

On the Parrot side, the shy lurkers thread produced several good ideas to get involved, from working with the docs to updating the web site and even working on the small TODO list.

On the Perl 6 side, the Perl 6 Stories wiki might be of some use, especially with a new Exegesis out now and Apocalypse 12 coming soon.

So basically no one has any idea :)

Project management in open source projects really needs to learn more from industry...

This is not your regular industry project.

If you want results, look at Parrot. They've been releasing often and have been making pretty impressive progress. And judging from the mailing lists, some language implementations targetting it went from experimental to "I can't believe it but this is mostly complete" in astonishingly short time. So once there's a sketch to look at for the implementation of Perl6 I'm pretty sure it will get done much sooner than anyone looking in from the outside would expect. I assume this part of the project will have little to learn from the industry.

The Perl6 language specification part of the process on the other hand is a different kind of beast entirely. It's much more comparable with, say, a W3C TR. Not surprisingly, some of those have been known to take a while to completion as well. Fundamental design in a previously unmapped area is not something you can really plan out; in fact, Perl6 is an exception in that it does have a roadmap (that is, the Camel book chapter order).

Makeshifts last the longest.

Project management in open source projects really needs to learn more from industry...

I quite agree. Industry is well known for bringing in successful IT projects on time and within budget.

...for the irony impared... :-)