Tunes OS review update

[Emmanuel Marty]

Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:

> Tom Novelli wrote:

[OS review dead projects sections]

> > I like that.. you're net getting our hopes up about some OS, only to find
> > it's dead. :)
> 
> I really liked this as well. This page is a wonderful resource
> and I hope links to it get spread to all the more frequently
> used reference pages.

Wow, thanks both of you :) I'm glad you like the new section and
the page. I like to read about OS projects, so the updates just come
from my bookmark :)

Let's not forget that Fare came up with a good 3/4 of the contents;
I took it over, added a lot of comments on the projects and added
a bunch of projects/reorganised a little, but it's based on
his work :)

> "Merlin OS" is now called "Self/R", where the "R" is for "reflective".
> The idea is that the language show be the most visible part in
> the system, not the OS. I still use the name "Merlin" for the hardware,
> however.

OK.. I'll change that. And I guess it'd be good measure to have a look
at your pages again :)

> > > This will really need a database of sorts sometime..
> > >
> > > URL is obviously still http://www.tunes.org/Review/OSes.html
> >
> > Hey, I'll keep that in mind while I'm checking out *nix database systems.
> > Now that I'm doing databases quite a bit at work, this looks easy.  Maybe we
> > could use Postgresql with a CGI script for searching/browsing, with
> > maintenance directly through Postgresql.
> >
> > Is a database really necessary though?  What can you do with one that you
> > can't do without one?

(That's for Tom :) Well, obviously we already do without one. The main
points of putting all the links in a database would be: allowing for
searches and easy category sorting; allowing user searches; and automatically
checking for dead links by periodically trying all the links in the database
(you could go through the HTML document parsing it right now, but it'd be
a lot more work); you could even allow users to enter and store an alternative
URL for a dead link.. things like that. If you want to look into it, you're
more than welcome to :)

> "Database of sorts" can mean even some text formatted in columns
> (like most Unix configuration files). Having something like that
> would allows several views of the list to be presented, which is
> certainly interesting.

True.. It doesn't have to be a full-blown sql-based system, but at
least some way to ease maintenance.. I update the review when I have
something like 2 or 3 hours of free time to go through all the links
and then write up new reviews because it's quite prohibitive.

> I was going to write an "OS table CGI" in Python but haven't found
> the time yet. Since I am currently wrapping up the stuff I started
> in 1983, you can be sure I'll get to this eventually :-)

Hehe but hopefully not all of my kids will be done with university
yet ;) (I don't have kids at the moment, even if I found the
"recipient" for them, so that should tell you how long that would
be :)

Thanks a lot for the comments, keep them coming :)

--
Emmanuel