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| From: | Donald Winiecki |
| Subject: | Re: [Gcl-devel] How to submit GCL patches |
| Date: | Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:29:58 -0700 |
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Hi Jerry, and all.
I'm not on the developer list. Sometime in the last year I started asking questions about a Win32 port of the GCL project and why the most recent Win32 was not up to date with the most recent Linux version. Camm and Gaby, and Mike Thomas (who has now left the project) provided a little bit of support and I'm now able to contribute Win32 builds.
I should also say that as a sociologist I am not very active in programming, though I am building a simulation in a multi-agent dialect of Logo to help me with my research. Lisp is a curiosity to me primarily because its functional style has always been a bit more sensible to me than the more common imperative style. I'm much more familiar with Logo but not in its most common `kids toy/tool' instantiation, rather from research I did during an earlier degree in which I was able to use its simpler-than-Lisp, but still very powerful nature, in research I was doing at the time.
Looking forward to seeing action on the list, though I don't really need more to do at the time.
_don
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Don Winiecki, Ed.D., Ph.D. Professor Boise State University, College of Engineering Department of Instructional & Performance Technology 1910 University Drive, Boise, Idaho 83725-2070 USA E-mail: address@hidden WWW: http://ipt.boisestate.edu Telephone: (+01) 208 426 1899 Fax: (+01) 208 426 1970 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ >>>
On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Jerry James <address@hidden> wrote: > 1. Who are the current developers? There's a list on the project web > page, but since I can't even get anybody to fix a broken link there > (see the first message in this thread), I have no confidence that > those pages aren't years out of date. So here's the list from the Savannah page, along with date of last CVS commit, followed by date of last message to this mailing list in YYYY-MM-DD format (the namazu results seem to indicate that either the archives are not complete, or some messages were sent off-list and replied to on-list, so these dates may be off arbitrarily): David Billinghurst <billingd>: NONE, 2008-12-09 Robert Alan Byer <ByerRA>: 2002-01-11, 2002-01-15 Camm Maguire <camm>: 2008-09-08, 2008-09-05 Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr>: 2006-10-27, 2008-12-02 Gene Cooperman <gene>: 2005-12-19, 2005-12-20 GOTO Kentaro <gotoken>: NONE, 2002-11-15 David Holmgren <holmgren>: NONE, 2002-03-21 Michael Koehne <kraehe>: 2003-08-08, 2005-02-16 Stavros Macrakis <macrakis>: NONE, 2008-04-17 Mike Thomas <mjthomas>: 2006-06-23, 2005-02-15 Paul F. Dietz <pfdietz>: 2006-05-31, 2005-08-08 Walt Read <read>: NONE, 2002-12-02 Aurelien Chanudet <rlbrk>: 2005-12-01, 2004-07-18 Robert Read <rread>: NONE, 2002-01-13 Viet Ha Nguyen <vietha>: NONE, NONE Vadim V. Zhytnikov <vvzhy>: 2003-11-22, 2005-08-07 Those who have responded to previous messages of mine are David Billinghurst and Gabriel Dos Reis. Thank you, David and Gabriel. It appears that you are the only GCL developers still reading this list. > 2. Who has editing rights on the project web pages? I don't know. > 3. Who has commit rights to the code repository? The developers, would be my guess. > 4. Who is in charge of release management? Since the last release was in 2005, my guess is nobody. > 5. What are the release criteria for 2.6.8 and 2.7.0, respectively? I haven't yet found any information on this. > 6. What processes are used to manage incoming patches? There doesn't seem to be one (anymore). > 7. What are the policies and procedures around recruiting new developers? I don't know. Along those lines, let me introduce myself and explain my interest in GCL. My first technical job, while still an undergraduate in Computer Science, was as a Lisp programmer. I worked for a year, writing an interviewing tool for a Psychology professor on what, if my memory hasn't failed me, was called Macintosh Allegro Common Lisp. This was around 1990 somewhere. I had read parts of CLtL1 while taking a Lisp class the previous year, and read CLtL2 from cover to cover during that time. I didn't touch Lisp much for a few years after that (unless you can count hacking on my ~/.emacs file). Then, halfway through grad school, a couple of Masters students doing some work for me asked me why I was using Emacs instead of XEmacs. I hadn't heard of XEmacs, so they clued me in. How could I resist the spiffy Gnus interface? So I became an XEmacs convert. I bumped into a few bugs, and started sending patches off to the XEmacs developers. Before long, they recruited me to become a developer, and later a member of the XEmacs Review Board. I've done a number of things to XEmacs (mostly good!), but my biggest feat was adding bignum/bigfloat support to XEmacs Elisp. I modeled it after the Common Lisp types. In 1999, I started life as a Computer Science professor, first at the University of Kansas, and later at Utah State University. During that time I started using PVS [1], which is written in Common Lisp, and started contributing to the project. Just this fall, I completed a port of PVS to SBCL (available Real Soon Now, once the SRI guys have time to roll out a new release). I have been told that GCL is the best-performing free Lisp, and there is a pretty big performance gap for PVS between SBCL and Allegro Lisp. I would like to port PVS to GCL next to have another point of comparison. Since Fedora is my platform of choice, I wanted GCL to be available on Fedora. And since the previous Fedora GCL maintainer gave up on GCL about the time I became interested, I took over. So here we are. I see some things I could do to improve GCL a little, here and there. What can be done to make that possible? References: [1] http://pvs.csl.sri.com/ -- Jerry James http://loganjerry.googlepages.com/ _______________________________________________ Gcl-devel mailing list address@hidden http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gcl-devel |
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