The future of Modules

[Peter W. O. <pw...@mc...>]

Hi everybody!

The development of Modules has somewhat slowed down since the first
beta releases of Modules 3.0 more than a year ago.  It was a busy time
for John Furlani, Jens Hamisch, and me.  John needed to get the XIL (X
Image Library) done, and recently switched jobs.  Jens and I founded a
company in Germany.  Finally I switched jobs, too, and relocated from
Germany to California to architect and build an engineering network for
the development of Integrated Circuits at four different locations in
California and Colorado.  I'm currently responsible for over 120 Unix
workstations and the networks for 200, and soon 300 people.

What got this all to do with Modules?  Glad you asked.  We simply were
to busy to get any substantial work done on Modules.  However,  I'm
finally in the process of setting up my development environment for
Modules and will start to spent a substantial portion of my spare time
to work on Moduels again.

My first goal is, to have a clean configure, build, and compile
environment on my development machines (SunOS 5.5.1 and SunOS 4.1.4)
with the latest Tcl/TclX versions (8.x).  Secondly, I want to go
through the Modules mailing list archive and through my list of error
reports and try to reproduce and fix defects that have been found so
far.  As problems get fixed, I do want to release new Modules versions
pretty often and will encourage other people to contribute fixes
against these new versions.  Once the most important problems have been
fixed, I would like to start to implement new features.

I hope I could answer some questions about the future of Modules.  I'm
still convinced that the Modules concept is one of the best to solve the
application activation problem.  Now I want to push the implementation
to the point where we can be proud of it ;-).  Then, it will hopefully
become even more popular.

Share & Enjoy!

	--pwo


>>>>> Now to something completely different ...

	A few weeks of developing and testing can save
	a whole afternoon in the library
		-- Achim Jung


--
Peter W. Osel			Systems & Networks Administration
Siemens Microelectronics, Inc.	Email:  pw...@HL...
10950 North Tantau Avenue	Phone:  +1 (408) 895 5050
Cupertino, CA 95014		Fax:    +1 (408) 895 5020
USA				WWW:    http://www.AgiX.NET/~pwo/