Re: (no subject)

["Marat Boshernitsan" <maratb cs berkeley edu>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mark Slicker" <jamess1 wwnet net>
To: "JP Rosevear" <jpr ximian com>
Cc: "Owen Fraser-Green" <owen discobabe net>; <gnome-devtools gnome org>
Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2001 10:59 PM
Subject: Re: (no subject)

[...]

> My reason for halting development was that I learned of planned release of
> Harmonia for around Novemeber/December so I thought I would wait and see
> what they did on many issues I hadn't resolved yet. Now a release for
> Harmonia apears indefinite and I still wanted to have a gpf-like library
> at hand so I think I will continue.
> 
> Also if any from the Harmonia project is listening, since your project is 
> intended for open-source use, I think you could benefit from a more open
> development process. You could continue to work on research, but also you
> could see more applications of your framework, get bug fixes, and
> feedback. There are many great ideas in your project and I would like to
> see them put to use.

Yes, we are listening!

There are several reasons for holding up the release of Harmonia.  Some are purely pragmatic: lack of documentation and of application showcasing the features of the framework.  Our hallmark application, the harmonia-mode for XEmacs, has been delayed by some internal re-architecting and we are hesitant to release the analysis library without being able to show off at least some of its features.  At this point in time we are hoping to release Harmonia at some point during the summer, at which time at least some of the documentation will also become available. (In particular, I am finishing up my M.S. report describing the framework at high-level.)

We are also considering going open-source, but at this point we are still debating.  On the one hand, it is true that we could benefit from involving external developers: there's a number of small (and  not so small) engineering projects that would take Harmonia to the level of something actually useful for building IDE-like tools.  One the other hand, we need to regain strong control over the framework (esp. at the design level) in order to adapt it to our research, yet, being a small research group with very limited funding we do not have the resources to manage a real open-source effort.  

It is also not clear how much the community could benefit from having a framework such as Harmonia available to them.  Keep in mind that many aspects of the framework are incomplete (e.g. the XML format for exchanging program data that was mentioned here is prototyped, but not actually implemented), we do not know whether it is sufficiently scalable, and we are less than convinced that it is usable for building real industrial-strength applications.  

I would very interested in starting a discussion on this topic, but we cannot commit to a definite answer about going open-source at this time.

Marat.