Re: [gobo-eiffel-develop] Introduction: Franck de Bruijn

[Eric B. <er...@go...>]

Dear Franck,

> Let me introduce myself. I am Franck and I am completely
> new at Eiffel.

Welcome to the Eiffel community.

> When I saw Eric's posting in the newsgroup that he is
> opening up the Gobo project for others and making it open
> source, I thought that this is a very interesting and very
> good move. I also saw that already one other Eiffel developer
> is willing to stop his work and contribute to this project.
> 
> I have a couple of questions that somebody might be willing
> to answer:

First, I must say that the project is only 3 days old,
so please forgive its lack of maturity.

> * What is the mission of this project?
>   What would you like to accomplish?

The goal of the project is to end up with an open source,
high-quality, compiler-independent and full-fledged Eiffel
library. That's what I always dreamt about when I started
developing Gobo Eiffel 6 years ago. However it is clear 
that I cannot achieve that alone. So when I was pushed
by some fellow Eiffelists to share the "fame" of Gobo
and open its development and include progressively the
Eiffel libraries written by others in order to create
a full-fledged and compiler-portable Eiffel library, I 
thought it was the good time to do it. So with this new
initiative I hope that we will reach this goal in a
reasonable amount of time, while keeping the quality of
the library to a high level.

>   What is the strategy?

First, before opening Gobo to too many libraries at once,
we need to define the "rules". Therefore we are currently
trying to specify some developer guidelines, installation
and build procedures, etc. The first step will be to use
the Unicode library from Majkel Kretschmar, the XML library
from Andreas Leitner and the Posix library from Berend de Boer
as guinea pigs while we are specifying all the guidelines
and try to merge them with the existing Gobo package. 
Reaching this stage will be a proof of feasability, and
to reuse Andreas Leitner's saying, it will be land no
Eiffelist has touched ever before. Hopefully we will be
able to reach this stage in a reasonable amount of time.
Then it will be easy (hopefully) to extend Gobo with many
other contributions with a greater pace since all the
guidelines, frameworks, procedures, etc. will already have
been discussed and put into place.

> * How many people are contributing to this project?
>   I see currently postings from 3 people.

Discussions about the guidelines etc. is open to everyone
interested in taking part into it. Building the first release
of this new Gobo package is currently limited to 4 people
since it is merely the merging of 4 already existing 
packages. When we reach this stage then it will be open
to many more people, but before having too many people
I think it is understandable that we need to specify the
guidelines.

> * Are there any "decision"-structures?
>   I am reading a lot of discussions (it takes me already
>   1 hour to read all the e-mails .... I am also not
>   understanding everything!) and of course I cannot value
>   the importance of these discussions. But it appears to me
>   that there maybe should be some decision-control, saying:
>   "Ok, stop the discussion: these are the options, let's
>   vote" or something like that. 

If we can avoid votes, I think that people would prefer.

>   I get the impression that
>   there is a lot of work ahead and if you start losing your
>   time with endless discussions not much will be realised
>   in the end ...

I agree, but hey, don't say that we are losing our time when
the project is only 3 days old! ;-) Furthermore I prefer that
we take our time to specify good foundations to the project
rather than we go too fast and then have to stop and redo
things later on.

> * What is currently going on in the Gobo project?
>   Which libraries are being taken into account? 

I think that you can have found that out by now if you
read this message until here. Things currently being
discussed: developer guidelines and a portable format
to specify Eiffel system (XACE by Andreas). Berend also
said that he was working on a tool to automatically
generate C compiler specific Makefiles (to compile C
code called from Eiffel external routines).

> Is there
>   any documentation available that I could look at?

The first draft of the developer guidelines can be found in
the mailing list archive.

> I have read some complaints about the (lack of) documentation
> of the libraries being developed by the Eiffel-community. One
> response was to one of these postings, that it was preferred
> to write code instead of documentation.

I prefer to write Eiffel code as well, but from time
to time I think it is important to hurt ourselves and
write some docs, examples and tests.

> I know that OOSC2 proposes the short form for documenting
> classes. I personally think it is just a part of documentation
> that you can cover with that. IMO, I think that you need things
> like "introductions", "user's guides", "installation guides"
> and stuff like that, before a library really gets mature. Of
> course, also a good web page and on-line help with examples
> and stuff are desirable.

Did you have a look at http://www.gobosoft.com and more
precisely at http://www.gobosoft.com/eiffel/gobo ? Is
that what you would expect from a doc or do you need
more? If yes, what? This doc is currently written in
HTML, but in the first draft of the guidelines I suggested
using the DocBook XML format to write docs. It has the
advantage of being able to generate many different output
(HTML, pdf, PostScript, etc.) out of these XML files, and
there are already many tools supporting this format since
it is used to write Linux docs.

You are of course welcome to take part into the discussions
in this mailing list and to contribute Eiffel software
as soon as we reach step 2, or even try to write some
test cases or examples if you think it's a good way to
learn about a given Eiffel library and about Eiffel in
general.

-- 
Eric Bezault
mailto:er...@go...
http://www.gobosoft.com