[Introspector-developers] status report november 5 2002

[James M. D. <mdu...@ya...>]

Dear fellow hackers, 

Thank you very much for you help and activity.
This is a long status report, and please read on if you have been one
of the helpers and/or are interested in helping out in the future.

Your help makes a difference, your ideas matter. 
Let me introduce some new and active members of the team,

We have a concrete set of goals for the next months. Get the GCC SSA
branch going, get the DIA port for Win32 going, get it tested,  get the
VCG going afterwards on top of the GTK+ GUI layer.. 

Mike Garnsey is the first active member of the project, he has posted
his LIb Pthread and libxml dlls for mingw32,I am very happy for all his
good help and support. It is important that we find united goals, so
that the motivation for the completion is higher. He is researching,
testing and documenting the mingw32 interface. Ths work he is doing
with me will give us a cross platform GUI for windows and linux, and
even other platforms. He will also be using this in other parts of
projects he is working on.

Mario Luca Bernardi has been hacking away at the GCC interface, 
togeather we have been testing the GCC interface. I am very happy about
all his good help. He is working on his further education and will be
intergrating some of his research into the gcc into this project.

E-Kyle,  Kyle Lahnakoski  has been helping reviewing the documentation
and providing some good and hard questions. He is interested in parsers
and languages. His work on the YAY, yet another yacc brings some
interesting aspects of parser generators and languages into the
project.

David Barker has done some interesting work with creating xml
representations of a commercial c++ compiler (edg IIRC) and has some
possible usages for the gcc. I hope to intergrate his research into the
project. 

Others have expressed interest and ideas in the GCC interface, in the
GUI tools, in the mingw32 port. 

The VCG usage has gotten some interest as well. I have received 3
patches, including the un-uglified one. The meeting with the FSF Europe
president George Greve went positive. I hope to have the name GNUVCG,
or  GnuViz(sualizer) approved soon.

The inline and swig groups have shown interest, the dotGNU have some,
but are apathetic to the cause of the introspector. I will send them
some notes of plans and ask for official oks before continuing. that
will buy us some more time.

I am going to be away until next wednesday,
flying back to the USA/NJ for the long weekend. Family visit, and long
weekend. 

The security devision of my work has said they are monitoring 
my irc and webmail, so I'll will be away from the IRC and mail at work 
for a while, sorry, it was fun.

The next goal for the project is the complete documentation of the
class model and some simple examples for building a compiler interface.
Alot of people have asked if we are still in the design stage,
no we have parts running, some with older versions of the compiler, 
but yes, the project is running, yes you can test parts of it. Yes we
are coding, we are not just in design stage.

It is time for me to buckle down, to start concentrating on things that
have to be done, and to remove the things that don't need to be done.

That means that I will be helping Mike and Mario as much as possible,
because they are the most active in the project and deserve the most
help needed. I will be supporting them in any way possible.

The irc channel #introspector at the irc.openprojects.net has come
along nicely, I am happy that so many of you have tried the connection.

I hope that by the end of novemeber we will have the dia/win32 port
ready for testing and the gcc/ssa branch as well. In fact, I hope to
port the gcc xml dumping to the cross compilier and create our own
package for the the gcc cross compiler. That will allow us to
experiment 
with the introspector on a set of needed packages.

I will also put the inline and cscc interfaces on hold for now,
the projects are not moving as we need them yet, and we need to get
some  
solid experience with releasing stable packages. I am grateful for so
many people subscribing to the mailling list, and hope that more will
step up and help out. It is strange for me who has been working on this
idea for so long to see so many good people help out.
That is why I will put the other aspects on hold to help out the people
who decided to make a difference, to help out, to test the software,
report bugs, even fix them. These people will get my #1 priority,
because they have decided to make a difference. 

Some people have expressed interest in helping out with the webpages,
does anyone want to help design a main project page, with some form of
main menu, to show all the aspects of the project and give a direction
to people who come to the project for the first time?


I wish you all a great next week, I will be checking in, but will try
and stay out of the workings untill next week.

Thanks for you time, and your help.

Regards,
Mike

=====
James Michael DuPont
http://introspector.sourceforge.net/

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