[LispM-Hackers] Who is doing what?

[John Morrison]

Hi;

I am trying to plan my next steps for e3 contributions, and I'd like
some help figuring out whether we've got all the bases covered.

Here are the things that I think need doing now that we've progressed
past loading the band (maybe not to everybody's satisfaction!).
Please suggest additions to the list.  I figure we've got two main
thrusts, the first of which is more important than the second.

(1) Do all the macroinstructions.  Now that we've been able to find the
first one, this should be reasonably straightforward.

(2) Concurrently make sure the thing builds on some different
platforms so that any "can't get there from here on this platform"
design flaws can be addressed while it's still early:

(a) Nyef has FreeBSD, right?
(b) james has a Sparc/Linux box, right?
(c) Steve has a Solaris box?
(d) I've got a Linux x86 box
(e) I've got a Win2K box (w/ mingw)
(f) I've also got a Win2K box w MSDEV 4 or 5 (I forget)
(g) At work, I've got access to Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, VxWorks, etc.

I *think* e3 builds and runs on a, b, d, e (with Cygwin instead of
mingw, which must be fixed), right?

I really only have time to do significant heavy-lifting on one of the
two thrusts.

I am more than happy to be the "porting" guy for the platforms I've
got access to.  To this end, I've got another 128MB bare-iron x86 box
I am about to reconfigure here.  I would like to know what I should
put on it, and what I should do next.  Options include:

(i) No host OS, and boot via Etherboot (or something like that), and
cross-compile from Linux.  (I have done this before, and it seems to
work fine, actually).

(ii) No host OS, but put some different filesystems on it (ext2, ext3,
FAT16, FAT32), and netboot and debug filesystem implementations

(iii) A stripped-down (maybe embedded) Linux OS, or maybe one of those
"boot from a floppy" versions, and then port e3 to either a
dynamically-loaded kernel module or a TFTP-loadable SVGAlib
application.  (This will take some exploratory programming.)

(iv) A boot-from-DOS DOS extender type application.  (This will take
exploratory programming.)

(v) Other options?

The Question is: if I am NOT going to do the heavy-lifting on (1)
above, who is going to do it?  If that is the case, and I am the
porting guy, what seems like a logical next step?

-jm

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
==== http://www.mak.com/
==== vox:617-876-8085 x115
==== fax:617-876-9208
==== jm@mak.com