framerd-developers — For people doing active development work on FramerD

[Framerd-developers] FASD project: Online survey launched

[Benno L. <ben...@id...>]

Dear Open Source developer

I am doing a research project on "Fun and Software Development" in which I
kindly invite you to participate.
You will find the online survey under http://fasd.ethz.ch/qsf/. The
questionnaire consists of 53 questions and you will need about 15 minutes to
complete it.

With the FASD project (Fun and Software Development) we want to define the
motivational significance of fun when software developers decide to engage
in Open Source projects. What is special about our research project is that
a similar survey is planned with software developers in commercial firms.
This procedure allows the immediate comparison between the involved
individuals and the conditions of production of these two development
models. Thus we hope to obtain substantial new insights to the phenomenon of
Open Source Development.


With many thanks for your participation,
Benno Luthiger


PS:
The results of the survey will be published under
http://www.isu.unizh.ch/fuehrung/blprojects/FASD/.
We have set up the mailing list fa...@we... for this study. Please
see http://fasd.ethz.ch/qsf/mailinglist_de.html for registration to this
mailing list.

_______________________________________________________________________

Benno Luthiger
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
8092 Zurich

Mail: benno.luthiger(at)id.ethz.ch
_______________________________________________________________________

[Framerd-developers] dtype specification/implementation questions

[<rm...@fa...>]

Hello list,

i'm currently working on a dtype library for the GUILE implementation
of the scheme language. First of all: i'm looking for the latest ad
greatest version of the dtype protocol specs. (my current working copy
is the document 'The Binary Dtype Protocol' by A. Abrams, K. Dines,
D. Gruhl, K. Haase & H. Holtzman, (c) 1996 MIT Media Lab, as given
in the apendix A of D. Gruhls dissertation. Is there a newer/more
official version of this document (and who is the current maintainer
of the dtype OID pool?).

Looking at the above mentioned specs. i have a few questions:

First of all, according to the specs. there's a dtype dt_float.
How can i generate such a thing. I tried the following:

(write-dtype-to-file 12.45 "float.dt")
(write-dtype-to-file 12.45f "float.dt")
(write-dtype-to-file 12.45d "float.dt")

but all of that end up in the following external representation:

  41 01 08 40 29 57 0a 3d  70 a3 d7

which points to the 'Advanced Numerics' package mentioned on page
6 of the specs (but unfortunately it doesn't provide detailed info
on that). What's the official way of writing dt_floats? (And is there
a chance to get the documentation for the existing packages?).
BTW, if someone does actually update the dtype spec. -- it might
be a good idea to pint out that the dt_float representation is the same
as the one used by XDR [man 3 xdr].

Second: i think there's a certain ambiguity in the dtype specification
for symbols (dt_symbol):

  (EQUAL? 
    (WRITE-DTYPE-TO-PACKET 'TEST)
    (WRITE-DTYPE-TO-PACKET '|TEST|))
  
  => #t 

  (EQUAL? 
    (WRITE-DTYPE-TO-PACKET 'test)
    (WRITE-DTYPE-TO-PACKET '|TEST|))
  
  => #t 


  (EQUAL? 
    (WRITE-DTYPE-TO-PACKET 'test)
    (WRITE-DTYPE-TO-PACKET '|test|))
  
  => #f 

FDScript obviously seems to assume that symbols with unspecified case
are converted to upper case.

 *[fdscript] (SYMBOL->STRING 'test)
 "TEST"

which, unfortunately, isn't the case in GUILE:

 guile> (symbol->string 'test)
 "test"

Is this a requirement of r^4rs (i'm not too familiar with that version
of the standard) ? If not, an aditional note in the dtype spec might be
neccessary.

 TIA Ralf Mattes

[Framerd-developers] Anybody here?

[Andreas B. <an...@an...>]

Hi everybody!

Just wanted to know whether this list is populated at all :).

And while I'm at it, I also have a question: how does FramerD handle
garbage collection? Does it at all?

I've written the following script to import my mail directory into
FramerD, and it keeps growing in memory continuously:

#!/usr/local/bin/fdscript

(set! %pool "/storage/mail.pool")
(set! %debug #t)
(use-pool %pool)
(define index "/storage/mail.index")
(use-index index)
;(set-default-encoding! "latin-1")

(define (allfiles dir)
  (if (directory? dir)
      (choice (getfiles dir)
	      (allfiles (getdirs dir)))
      (choice dir)))

(define (read-mime-to-database filename)
  (let ((frame (make-frame))
	(mail-slotmap (READ-MIME (filestring filename))))
    (doslots (unit key value MAIL-SLOTMAP) (fadd! frame key value))
    (let ((message-id (fget frame 'message-id)))
      (when message-id (fadd! frame 'obj-name message-id)))
    (index-frame index frame)
    (commit-pool %pool)
    (commit-index index)
    (write frame)))

(define (main)
  (dolist (filename (cdr args))
	  (read-mime-to-database (allfiles filename)))
  (commit-pool %pool)
  (commit-index index))

Andreas