I would like to suggest 3 concrete goals for the short term:
(A) a new maintenance release
(B) merge the GCC 3.x mods into the trunk
(C) revamp the web site
======================================================================
(A) A NEW MAINTENANCE RELEASE
* Kevin has fixed an important GC bug
* the PS/PDF documentation is curiously screwed up (we only discovered
this today)
therefore: if there is something that you feel should be part of this
update, act now AND tell me about your intent to act!
I would VERY MUCH appreciate if someone could volunteer to take care
of it. This is a very very minor maintenance release, and therefore
very well suited to someone with little experience in the matter.
I'll guide you through the steps (so it is just as much work for me,
if not more - but then you'll be yet another person knowing how to do
the job).
======================================================================
(B) MERGE THE GCC 3.x MODS INTO THE TRUNK
that the mods went into the current release branch was not my original
plan. I hope everybody is now clear on the circumstances and
understands how this happened.
the unfortunate consequence is that the very desirable distribution
improvements in the trunk have been delayed much much too long, and
past everybody's patience. I fully understand (and share) Kostja's
aggravation with the situation. Again: that was not the plan. Let's
fix it!
I would like a _junior_ developer to be assigned to the job, for a
bunch of reasons:
- I don't want to be stuck with all the shitty jobs, sorry :-)
and too much depends on me doing these jobs - this cannot scale,
nor, in fact, continue much longer
- this is a good way to become aquainted with many aspects on the
mozart implementation
- it is not that hard, really, merely a bit tedious
- we vitally _need_ more/younger developers to become part of the
core development team
I don't want to point fingers, but we all know who could do it (Hi,
Kev... I mean mister X :-)
======================================================================
(C) REVAMP THE WEB SITE
there are many things wrong with the web site as it stands. Foremost:
- things are not well presented
- I received encouraging feedback for my alternative presentation:
http://www.loria.fr/~duchier/Mozart/
which is perceived as simpler and more ... er... übersichtlich,
whatever that's supposed to be in English. I am not proposing the
color scheme (in fact, I'd like to set things up so that _anybody_
can try out and propose a different color scheme - this way you'll
be arguing among yourselves instead of with me :-)
- News and Dynamic updates: the current site SUCKS because nothing
ever changes that anybody can see. We have no news about what's
going on, no postings about MOGUL updates. The feeble news
support that we have is simply not right. What we need here are
RSS feeds for Mozart-related information (I'd like to elaborate on
that, but not in this short proposal). We need these feeds right
there on the front page.
- we need to make projects that use Mozart highly visible from the
website itself
- we need to make 3rd party tutorials, teaching material, books
prominently visible
I'll volunteer for the web site, because I am an idiot, and I am doing
similar things for my own use anyway.
Cheers,
-- Dr. Denys Duchier Équipe Calligramme LORIA, Nancy, FRANCE - Please send submissions to hackers@mozart-oz.org and administriva mail to hackers-request@mozart-oz.org. The Mozart Oz web site is at http://www.mozart-oz.org/.