On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 4:53 PM, Irek Szczesniak <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Glenn Fowler <[email protected]> wrote: >> As has been pointed out several times on the AST and UWIN lists, AT&T gives >> very little support to OpenSouce software, which is why we have so few >> people involved with our rather large collection of AST software. In spite >> of this, ksh, nmake, vczip, UWIN and other AST tools continue to be used in >> several AT&T projects. >> >> It turns out that software isn't the only thing lacking support: both dgk >> (AT&T fellow, 36 years of service) and gsf (AT&T fellow, 29 years of >> service) have been terminated, effective October 10. Our third major >> partner, Phong Vo (AT&T fellow, 32 years of service), left a few months ago >> for Google. The UWIN maintainer, Jeff Fellin, is still with AT&T and >> provides UWIN support for some critical operations. >> >> Both dgk and gsf will continue to work on AST software, and might actually >> have more time (at least in the short run) to focus on it. >> >> The download site and mail groups will remain within AT&T for at least the >> next several months. Our AT&T colleague, dr.ek, AST user and bug detector, >> will maintain the site. We have secured the astopen.org domain and are >> investigating non-AT&T hosting options, including a repository with bug >> tracking. >> >> The process of change will take time; the patience of the user community >> will be greatly appreciated. Its quite a shock to have 3 weeks to plan >> personal, career, and hacking futures after working in an environment that >> has essentially been stable for almost 30 years. The user groups will be >> informed as plans solidify. > > This is quite a shock, but detail analysis shows that AT&T was fixed > down that path for at least the last 4-5 years. Research was ongoing > but it appeared to be disconnected from what the rest of AT&T was > doing and neither was the "rest" much interested what AT&T Research > was doing. Such a disconnect is unhealthy for both sides. > > But... this is all not important right now. > > First question is: Can the community help? > > Second question is: What will happen to the AST and UWIN projects? > Both have solid and good codebases, but almost no market share, which > is mostly an issue that (compared to GNU, GNU coreutils or Cygwin) no > lobbying happens. Each time a major or minor feature hits in GNU > territory a lot of fuzz is made while AST and UWIN do... nothing, > except a small entry in RELEASE. > The other notable problem is the lack of community integration, with > the top items being a public bug tracker, a public GIT or Subversion > repository where development happens (the old GIT tree was a joke > because only releases showed up there, what's needed is that you do > individual commits there) and a software library for UWIN.
Brainstorming with my staff here: Third: Allow 3rd-party people to commit changes to the main branches of ast-open and UWIN codebases (after code review and approval of course) Fourth: Better documentation. The documentation of both ast-open and UWIN is, as understatement, very terse and not sufficient to help beginners. Irek _______________________________________________ ast-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.research.att.com/mailman/listinfo/ast-users
