TUNES Update

[Tom Novelli]

Greetings, everyone... I'm writing to bring you up to date on what little
progress has been made in the TUNES project:

1. Website

I've moved the new site to http://tunes.org/ ... It's a little spiffier now,
and I've started to address some of the shortcomings that Keith pointed
out.  Further suggestions welcome!

The gory details:
    The new site consists of HTML generated by the CMS, from source files in
a MySQL (soon to be SQLite) database.  The old files are still there for
now, but the CMS will overwrite them if the same name is used.
(See http://tunes.org/sitemap.html for an index of old files)
    I disabled the 'update_tunes' line in ~tunes/bin/junk.script -- That's
so changes made to the old "master website" (in CVS) won't interfere with
the new site.  As far as the TUNES website is concerned, we don't need CVS
anymore.
    I'm also planning to move all the old stuff (of some value) into a
central archive, and delete everything else, to make this less confusing for
the next maintainer.


2. Newsletter / Announcements

I will be posting an update like this at least once a month, on the mailing
list and the website, if only to say "we're still alive" and to mention a
few outside developments of interest to this group.

Any contributions (preferably at least 50 words in length) can be emailed to
me.


3. Future Directions

I'd like to start a discussion on the "ideal" framework for organizing
information, with an eye toward future versions of the website CMS.  Issues
include metadata, versioning, multiple users, distributed storage and
migration.

New major versions of Python, Ruby, Perl and Javascript are in the planning
stages, probably for the next 2-4 years.  They're all talking about static
typing, native compilation, real GC, and so on -- and borrowing heavily from
one another.  These languages won't give up their individuality yet, but a
"common core" is entirely possible.  This has the potential to make TUNES a
reality, in large part.  If we do our homework, this could be an opportune
time to weigh in.

 - Tom Novelli
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