[m-dev.] diff: mercury meeting minutes
Fergus Henderson
fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Thu Apr 26 02:48:27 AEST 2001
As discussed earlier, we're now following the policy
of posting the meeting minutes first to the participants
for review, and then posting the diff to mercury-developers.
(Diffs normally go to mercury-reviews, but the minutes should be of
general interest, so as an exception they go to mercury-developers;
alternatively, we could post the minutes to mercury-developers and
the diff to mercury-reviews, but I think we agreed that's probably
overkill).
Anyway, here it is.
----------
Estimated hours taken: 0.75
Branches: main
w3/news/reportsdb.inc:
w3/information/reports/minutes_20_04_01.html:
Minutes for the Mercury meeting held on 20th April 2001.
Workspace: /home/hg/fjh/ws-hg2/mercury
Index: w3/information/reports/minutes_20_04_01.html
===================================================================
RCS file: minutes_20_04_01.html
diff -N minutes_20_04_01.html
--- /dev/null Thu Mar 30 14:06:13 2000
+++ minutes_20_04_01.html Thu Apr 26 02:37:08 2001
@@ -0,0 +1,141 @@
+
+<html>
+
+<pre>
+We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri March 30, 2001,
+from 3.15pm to 4.35pm.
+
+Attendees:
+ Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
+ Fergus Henderson (trd)
+ Simon Taylor (stayl)
+ David Overton (dmo)
+ Kevin Glynn (keving)
+
+Progress reports
+
+ We went around the table, with each person in turn discussing what
+ they had been working on recently and/or what they were planning
+ to work on.
+
+ Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
+ - Working on cleaning up deep profiling.
+ It now bootstraps and passes all the test cases except for
+ - split_c_files
+ - the debugger tests that use `retry'
+ - exception handling tests that catch exceptions
+ (just throwing without catching works, though)
+ There are also some issues with the UI and documentation
+ that need to be resolved.
+ Plans to merge the the deep profiling branch changes back
+ onto the main branch soon.
+
+ - Mentioned a `cvdd' script for doing diffs on two Mercury
+ repository; fjh suggested that it might be a good idea
+ to put that in the `tools' directory in our repository
+
+ Simon Taylor (stayl)
+ - Has continued working on a system to keep track of compilation
+ dependencies in a fairly fine-grained way.
+ - Agreed to put support for `--make' option (see below)
+ on his long-term TODO list.
+
+ David Overton (dmo)
+ - Has implemented, in Mercury, the extensions to ROBDDs that
+ Peter Schache describes in his thesis.
+ (This is built on top of Peter's C implementation of basic
+ ROBDDs and a thin Mercury interface to this which dmo
+ wrote about a year ago.)
+ - Continued working on the new mode checker.
+ New mode checker is still looping on `deriv' test case
+ - We suggested that it would be good for dmo to commit his
+ stuff on a branch, and probably also to put the extended
+ ROBDDs package in the extras distribution on the main branch.
+ The issue of needing this in both the compiler and
+ the extras should be handled the same way as for dl.m,
+ putting it in the `compiler' directory in the CVS repository
+ and copying it to the extras directory when we build the
+ extras distribution.
+
+ Fergus Henderson (fjh)
+ - Has been helping people to port Mercury to Mac OS X (Darwin).
+ zs suggested asking about the possibility of getting a
+ guest account.
+
+ - Has been working on solving abstract equivalence types
+ problem for .NET/Java back-ends.
+
+ zs said he didn't like tying this to
+ `--intermodule-optimization'.
+ After some discussion, fjh agreed. zs suggested instead
+ keeping a database of all equivalence types.
+ fjh said this is similar to the approach of using `.typ'
+ files; will look more at that approach.
+ `--intermodule-optimization' will be used as an interim
+ solution.
+
+ - Has been working on porting Mercury to Mingw.
+ We discussed some of the issues here.
+
+ dmo asked why dependency on Cygwin is a problem;
+ answers were cultural issues, use of Unix pathnames,
+ and extra download. fjh will investigate the possibility
+ of a minimal solution which fixes the pathname issues
+ without bothering to eliminate all the dependencies on
+ Cygwin.
+
+ Dependencies on Cygwin are:
+ - scripts: mmc, c2init, ml
+ - mmake
+ Some of this functionality could migrate into the
+ the Mercury compiler:
+ - basic functionality would be to have
+ an option (`--build'?) to do all the
+ steps of compilation (mmc --make-short-int,
+ mmc --make-int, mmc --compile, link)
+ - next level is having an option (`--make')
+ to only build things if they are out-of-date
+ - last level is the stuff you can do using
+ non-trivial Mmakefiles: having different
+ sets of options for different modules,
+ extra targets, etc.; we probably *don't* want
+ to put that kind of functionality in the
+ compiler
+ - use of shell commands in the compiler, e.g. `mkdir'
+ Possible alternative would be to do that directly,
+ using system calls, rather than using shell commands.
+
+General discussion
+
+ - zs brought up the point that the Posix library (and others in
+ the extras distribution) lack visibility; could we put in the
+ main compiler distribution?
+ Perhaps there should be a second class of standard libraries
+ for non-portable libraries which are nevertheless always installed
+ on systems which support them.
+ fjh said that portability is not the only problem; the current Posix
+ library is also not complete enough or well-documented enough to meet
+ our quality standards for the standard library.
+
+ - we discussed changing (reducing) the set of grades installed by
+ default. zs suggested the possibility of an interactive choice.
+ fjh said that `configure' can't be interactive, since that would
+ violate GNU standards, but we could have an interactive "install"
+ script that asked the user which grades they wanted (minimal,
+ complete, or custom; then if custom, do you want debugging,
+ profiling, trailing, etc.) and then invoked "configure", "make",
+ and "make install".
+
+ - We discussed making `--use-subdirs' enabled by default.
+ Not a big issue on Linux, because of sufficiently efficient
+ file system access even with large numbers of files in a single
+ directory, but may be useful on other systems.
+ This would make it trivial to migrate `mmake clean'
+ functionality into the compiler.
+ It might also be particularly useful if we also change mmake
+ to support building multiple grades in a single directory
+ simultaneously.
+
+Minutes taken by Fergus Henderson (fjh at cs.mu.oz.au).
+</pre>
+</html>
Index: w3/news/reportsdb.inc
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/mercury1/repository/w3/news/reportsdb.inc,v
retrieving revision 1.18
diff -u -d -r1.18 reportsdb.inc
--- w3/news/reportsdb.inc 2001/04/02 01:11:12 1.18
+++ w3/news/reportsdb.inc 2001/04/20 07:36:17
@@ -12,6 +12,8 @@
*/
$reportsdb = array(
+ "20 April 2001" =>
+ array("minutes_20_04_01.html", "Mercury Meeting Minutes"),
"30 March 2001" =>
array("minutes_30_03_01.html", "Mercury Meeting Minutes"),
"16 March 2001" =>
--
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au> | "I have always known that the pursuit
| of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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