Are we dead or alive? (was Re: a good volunteer)

[John Morrison]

Hello Mike (et al);

Mike McDonald wrote:
>   You could link in the C portion of CMUCL and put the lisp.core in
> the ramdisk and away you go! (You might want ot build a stripped down
> version of the C code that doesn't have all of the Unix stuff in it.
> Then reimplment that stuff in native CL.)

Cool!  I will confess that I don't know, well, to put it politely,
*anything* about CMUCL and its build process. (I'm assuming I can build
CL-language drivers into the lisp.core under UNIX and then download the
lisp.core in its entirety, true?  Please tell me it also builds under
Linux (that's unavoidably where my toolchain resides).  If so in both
cases, then we're way closer than I thought we were.)

>   Where's your code at?

Well, right now the list of things to do before release 0.00 (I
considered making the release number a *signed* quantity, but I think
most people might've missed the joke) is pretty short.  

(1) I've got one thing to fix with respect to reserving memory for the
ramdisk at the end of "extended" memory.  I do not anticipate major
problems.

(2) I've got to baseline and check-in the sources.

(3) I've got to build and compress a tgz file containing the source,
binaries, and tools (the authors of the various tools I use have
graciously consented to redistribution of their tools along with the
native-code-runtime subject to their original license restrictions).

(4) I've got to upload the tgz file to the JOS FTP server.  I get the
feeling it'll be pretty damned big, and I'm on a lowly 28.8 serial
connection here.

(5) I've got to send email to the JOS lists (and maybe this one, if
enough people care) announcing the release.

(6) I'm going to "duck and cover" and wait for the dust to settle.  I
expect to field lots of complaints about: the license restrictions (I
have been too busy to figure out which NPL/PSI/BSD license to use yet,
so I've put a fairly brief and fascist one in the source files); the
lack of functionality ("that's IT?  That's ALL? Where's the REST of
it?"); the decision to use C++ (I've already gotten a good deal of
that); the decision to write code that does not conform to the
design-by-committee "jos-kernel" interface (hell, I keep saying "it's
NOT A KERNEL!"); the decision to use a different JVM than the
Politically Correct one (gotten some of that, too); etc.  You get the
idea.  I just hope my inbox doesn't get swamped.

-jm

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