Project organization

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

Dear joyous Tunespeople,
   the project is only slowly evolving, and I'm the only one to
contribute actively to the documents. There sure is some organizational
problem behind this.
   Which leads me to the question: how do you consider working on the
project ? First, let's sum up what's the current project organization and
state.

   Currently, I'm publishing my thoughts as fast as I can redact them
on the WWW, and go on hacking my as86+m4 code, and publish regular
releases of the whole, with patches so you don't need ftp it all every time.
You need GNU patch to use those patches. 
   As of latest release 0.0.0.10, the distribution is divided into
= a "bin" tree which is 11KB compressed, and contains main README,
 Makefile, scripts, and configuration files.
= "doc" tree which is 278KB compressed, and contains the WWW page, info
 files, and miscellaneous old stuff.
= a "src" tree which is 95KB and currently contains only my old TASM and new
 as86+m4 code to boot on the i386 architecture.
= a mailing list archive, which is 1400KB, half being old MOOSE mailing list
 archive, and half (growing) TUNES mailing list archive. I'll soon split it
 into the old MOOSE list, and a separate archive for the TUNES stuff.
= Patches that are some tens of KB each time, and do not include the mailing
 list archive. The latest, and also the largest patch is 58KB large compressed.
 If you want, I can mail it to you; else, you can ftp it. If there is any
 demand, I'll have separate patches for the bin, doc, and src trees.
   As you see, the whole distribution is around 400KB, and the mailing list
archive is 1400KB. Each patch is around 50KB. So I advise you ftp release
0.0.0.10 and from then on, subscribe to the patches. This would solve
both problems of people having slow links or not being able to flush httpd
cahce (hey, Jecel ;) !


   Now, what about YOU ?

   We can all write in the tunes mailing list, but discussion needs be
integrated into documents not to be mere chat, or else we'll fail like
the MOOSE projet.
   Which is why we are working on a common document, that we currently
publish on the WWW, and thus need maintainers, to manually ensure document
consistency, as long as we do not have software to do that (which should
be our first application project).

   You can send feedback about those documents, but currently,
you seldom do: it seems difficult for you to read them regularly.
   For that reason, in my latest releases, I've included a page pointing to
what's new since the previous release, which should help you be read the WWW
page incrementally.

   However, I currently am the only maintainer, together with Chris.
I really think we should divide a lot more the work, so we can advance
much quicker. The maintainers should also maintain a page about work to
do, and have a way to assign work to project members. How do you suggest
we do that ?

   What other kind of working methods do you suggest ?
   We can't physically meet, as we are in very distant places. We could
IRC, if we could rendez-vous at a same hour when everybody is awake.
   We may develop some convention that would allow automatic annotation
of documents through messages on the list.

   Again, the project is very open to suggestion.

P.S.: pick your subproject. Only the HLL and UI subprojects have found
definitive maintainers. The following subprojects are still only
temporarily maintained by me:
root project, Review subproject, LLL subproject, Migration subproject,
metatranslation and C translation subprojects (under the HLL project),
i386 and OTOP subprojects (under the LLL project). More if you want.

--    ,        	                                ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
--                                      '                   / .          --
Join the TUNES project for a computing system based on computing freedom !
		   TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient System
WWW URL: http://acacia.ens.fr:8080/home/rideau/Tunes/
IRC: on undernet (e.g. /server us.undernet.org) channel #Tunes
FTP SITE: ftp://frmap711.mathp7.jussieu.fr/pub/scratch/rideau/Tunes/
contains full (~300K) distribution, regular patches (~30K) to upgrade,
and the full (~1400K) mailing list archive for MOOSE & TUNES.
Get any by mail and/or subscribe to patches by sending me mail.