From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id WAA11170; Sat, 17 Aug 2002 22:37:49 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id WAA11160 for ; Sat, 17 Aug 2002 22:37:48 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from saul.cis.upenn.edu (SAUL.CIS.UPENN.EDU [158.130.12.4]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g7HKblj09124 for ; Sat, 17 Aug 2002 22:37:48 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by saul.cis.upenn.edu (8.12.5/8.12.5) with SMTP id g7HKbkir011638 for ; Sat, 17 Aug 2002 16:37:46 -0400 (EDT) To: caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Subject: [Caml-list] Unison status and request for help... Reply-to: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu Date: Sat, 17 Aug 2002 16:37:45 EDT Message-ID: <11637.1029616665@saul.cis.upenn.edu> From: "Benjamin C. Pierce" Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Executive summary: Experts in both OCaml and Unison, your help is needed! --------------------- If you're a satisfied user of the Unison file synchronizer, you might have wondered if there was anything you could do to pay back the karma that you've been accumulating by using this great tool completely free of charge. This message is for you... Unison has come a long way in the past few years: from an experimental research prototype with a handful of users, it's become a stable, full-featured system with a significant user community (several thousand, at least) and wide visibility (e.g., it's included in several Linux distributions). It is often cited as a success story for OCaml: its portability and robustness are due in large part to the excellent engineering of the OCaml language and compiler. A natural effect of its popularity is that maintaining Unison, responding to postings on the users list, investigating bug reports, etc. has become a lot of work. At the same time, the original developers have all moved on to other places and other research activities: Trevor Jim is now at AT&T Research, Jerome Vouillon is at CNRS Paris, Zhe Yang just moved to Aleri Systems, and I, though still at Penn, am spending my research energy on a follow-on system called Harmony. What this means is that there is no longer *any one* whose primary job it is to maintain and improve Unison. At this point, some help is needed from the user community to ensure that Unison continues to grow and improve. * We need as many "unison experts" as possible to join in discussions and respond to queries on the unison-users list. This is something that everyone can help with. If you consider yourself a power user of unison and you see a posting on a topic that you know something about, please jump in! * We need a few "unison hackers" who can help with investigating bug reports. Contributing to this activity will require (or involve acquiring) at some familiarity with OCaml programming and with the Unison codebase. (Tracking down the really nasty bugs sometimes involves familiarity with the internals of the ocaml compiler and runtime system, but most bugs are not this hard.) To facilitate discussions of unison internals, I've created a new mailing list, unison-hackers@yahoogroups.com. You can subscribe by sending a message to unison-hackers-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Archives will be kept at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/unison-hackers. Among other things, this list will be used to announce change summaries for all checkins to the unison source repository. Checkins will be reflected immediately in the "developer tarball" available through the download page. (It may be useful at some point to move this repository to someplace like SourceForge, to make it easier for people outside of Penn to commit changes. For now, though, proposed changes can be submitted as patches to bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu.) This list is also the place to discuss implementation issues for new functionality. However, the focus in Unison's development will be on correctness, stability, and robustness -- new features will not be added to the main distribution unless they meet high standards of clean design and coding. * We badly need a Unison/Windows maintainer -- someone who understands the intricacies of OCaml compilation on Windows systems, can keep the Win32 source-installation instructions up to date with new versions of OCaml and Windows, build Windows executables for new Unison releases, etc. (This need is really urgent: none of the current developers are heavy Windows users.) If you would be interested in taking this on, please send a message to bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu. * We could also use a few people to help moderate the unison-users list. This is a light task -- moderation is only used to filter spam, and the group is set up so that pending messages can be approved or rejected by any of the moderators in just a few keystrokes. If you'd like to be a moderator, just send a message to bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu. (You'll need to subscribe to the list first, if you are not already a member.) Thanks! Benjamin ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners