Plans

[Tom Novelli]

Greetings...

I met up with Fare for another informal planning session 2 weeks ago.  
(I apologize for the delay; I've spent those 2 weeks trying to make the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts live up to its promise of affordable 
health insurance.  But that's another story!)  Anyway, without further 
ado, here is a summary of our discussion:


WEB SITE

1. I will upgrade the CMS any day now (and rename it according to RMS's 
terminology - Website Revision System - which makes more sense to me!)  
Major changes include WSGI support, simplifications, and integration 
with the Member List, so any member/lurker can easily edit the website 
once granted permission.

2. Set up a GIT repository for code projects.  (forget DARCS, SVN, Monotone)

3. Fare has volunteered to set up UML - UserMode Linux.  Hopefully, this 
will give us a lot more flexibility while making life easier for Tril.


CODE PROJECTS

(What's needed is for a few core members to start something to show 
we're not all talk)

4. Let's declare Common Lisp our "platform of choice" for current 
development.  We recognize that it's far from ideal, and intend to 
replace it with The Right Thing eventually.  Meanwhile, at least we can 
use try out Tunes ideas as we write *useful* programs that run on 
*existing* systems.

 (a) Write a short guide on getting started with CL quickly and 
painlessly (short short version: install Debian/Ubuntu; install sbcl, 
emacs21, slime, cua.el)  I'll do this since I'm new to CL.

 (b) Add PLT-style embedding of different syntaxes, to make CL 
attractive to people like me who hate its syntax [see DrScheme, DrPython]

 (c) Add a "compembler" [see Movitz]

 (d) Add Erlang-style concurrency, Software Transactional Memory 
(essentially a language-independent version of SQL transactions), 
Algebraic Data Types, and so on... (see item #6 below)

5. Take a thorough look at the following projects to see what we can 
learn/borrow from them, or add to them:

 - Movitz (a Lisp OS)
 - POP-11 (an old multi-paradigm language system)
 - McCLIM (a Lisp user interface system *similar* to Tunes UI ideas)
 - PLT Scheme (with its innovative IDE) and related work

6. Begin preparations for Google SoC 2008.  For starters, see Fare's 
term project proposals 
[http://fare.tunes.org/computing/term-project-proposal.html]


RESEARCH / BRAINSTORMING

7. Imagine a future Internet with standardized content-addressable 
storage, decentralized name lookup, a meaningful concept of identity, 
peer-to-peer wireless mesh networks, or whatever innovations you can 
think of.  In that context, address the "Tunes Distributed Publishing" 
problem...


Anyway, that's my take.  Fare may have something to add.  Comments most 
welcome.

- Tom