[LispM-Hackers] (statusp)

[James A. Crippen]

On Wed, 29 Aug 2001, John Morrison wrote:

> "James A. Crippen" wrote:
> > What's the current status of E3?  How do people feel about it?
>
> I'm still slogging away, albeit s-l-o-w-l-y.

Good to hear.  Admittedly I haven't done anything productive.  I did start
work on a non-ncurses FEP for another project that I'm playing with
(FooLisp, which is a toy for experimenting with Lisp implementation
strategies and perhaps for a small embedded Lisp).  That FEP could easily
be integrated into E3 and would make it tremendously easy to interactively
chase data and instructions around in the memory without having to resort
to using GDB and calculating offsets.  But it's not done yet.

I'm out from under my company's crunch time.  I only have a couple of
major things to do before winter hits in a month and a half.  Once winter
hits I won't have much else to do but fuck around on the computer, which
means probably spending a lot more time developing for fun.  I'm also
getting off of work early enough to have an evening instead of going home,
eating, and straight to bed.

> > Web page?

I'll throw together a preliminary page and put it somewhere.  Anyone with
recommendations can mail the list when it's up.  Please recommend
somehting.  Anything.

I am opposed to flashy graphics and complicated layout, so the page can be
expected to look something like my home page or bookmarks:

  http://www.unlambda.com/~james {/bookmarks.html}

> > Bug tracking?

Is everybody happy with using Bugzilla or are there other suggestions?  I
have experience with Bugzilla.  I don't have experience with making GNATS
work, but I got halfway through it once before I switched to Bugzilla.

I'd love a Lisp solution, but that's in the future.  (UncommonSQL looks
nice.)

> > Anonymous CVS?

Can be done.  Should it be public on the web page or do people need to be
in the know?

> > Anonymous FTP?
>
> Maybe for the documents, which are kind of big.  BTW, Fare Rideau
> (www.tunes.org) has already asked for me to scan in my copy of the CHINE
> NUAL, and I'm sure that if he knew we had the TI SSDN in softcopy, he'd
> want that, too.

Will be done.  If I create an FTP directory and chown/chmod it so that
anyone in the group can write to it, and anonymous can read from it, will
people put things in there that seem relevant?  I'd also like to link
the same sort stuff from the web page.

> > As far as current tasks go, I think we need to have some sort of simple
> > task list with a note of the person claiming the task (or if it's
> > unclaimed).
>
> I used to have a TODO list file at the top of the sources, but it was
> really informal and kind of cryptic (if you're not me, and you probably
> don't want to be).

If you could bring it somewhat up to date with some notes I'll make it
more easily readable and stick it on the prenatal web page.  Once a bug
tracking system is working that can be used for feature tracking, ideas,
etc.

> > So to start with I'd like to know what sort of tasks we have.  What's
> > necessary *right now* and what is necessary down the road?  What's on the
> > critical path?  I'd love to author a task list so we know what our plans
> > are.
>
> I was trying to implement the first macroinstruction, and then ran into
> my woefully-incomplete DTP-STACK-GROUP implementation (if you could call
> it that).  That's pretty much where I am.

What I need to know is what else is on the critical path, and what other
features would be nice to have at this point.  And who wants
responsibility for them.  And maybe expected completion dates, but I don't
want to stress that sort of thing right now.

'james

-- 
James A. Crippen <james@unlambda.com> ,-./-.  Anchorage, Alaska,
Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us   |  |/  | USA, 61.2069 N, 149.766 W,
Y = \f.(\x.f(xx)) (\x.f(xx))         |  |\  | Earth, Sol System,
Y(F) = F(Y(F))                        \_,-_/  Milky Way.