RFC: TUNES Specification Pre-Pre-Draft

[Brian T Rice]

Hello all,

In a fit of annoyance at my own lack of progress on the actual definition
of TUNES (as opposed to the great work being done on the CLiki by all), I
have put together with some help a little document which attempts to
initiate a fairly-formal definition of a TUNES system. From the abstract:

"A schematic description of the TUNES architecture is presented. This is a
working draft, designed to provide precise technical feedback to TUNES
members as design issues are resolved. Implementation strategies are
suggested, but not specified."

What follows are some ideas put in a form somewhat like Common Lisp's
X3J13 specification (http://cliki.tunes.org/CLHS), but obviously our needs
are much different from Lisp's. In particular, there is a great intended
gap between the basic concepts and the interface ideas and migration and
such. So if we all agreed on something based on this, it would not matter
what language were used to bootstrap, since this would be the judge of the
final product, and nothing else.

I suppose that this is, in a way, a first step to getting our project to
be truly democratic. I understand the concerns many people have that I am
not sharing enough control over the course of the project, but a
democratic society thrives on an informed citizenry, and the overhaul of
the site has been a major part of that and will continue to grow that way.
The only way in our current course to have acheived this is for me to
proceed this way until everyone is well-informed and understands the goals
and the processes involved.

Now, I have not entered them into TUNES' CVS archives yet, because I am
not re-interpreting agreed-to documents on the TUNES site any longer, but
trying to formulate them in a totally different way. When we have grown
this out into something that seems to satisfy everyone, it could be
entered. (Also I used my favorite tool to do this, LyX, which is not a
common one, so I didn't want the archive to rely on it.) Here are the
forms of it:

http://tunes.org/~water/spec.lyx
http://tunes.org/~water/spec.ps
http://tunes.org/~water/spec.pdf

A simple way to all be involved developing it would include providing
basic specification elements like terms and operations on the cliki, but
it's too early to even know what the right form for this is.

At some point soon I may move development to TeX, since TeXmacs provides
useful management of glossary functionality in a document. However,
TeXmacs is a heavyweight tool.

There is a LOT to do within this area, but this can proceed based on what
we learn in the prototypes and what conclusions we can draw from the
evidence being gathered daily on the CLiki! I find everything there very
exciting; as of sending this mail we have a total of 836 nodes. I'll
probably make an announcement when we reach 1000 or something.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/