Weekly Planning Meeting, 1/30

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

Highlights 1/30:

The big congratulations this week go to ravi and markm, ravi 
and dean, and...ravi :-). Ravi and markm together earned a lunch 
bet from dean for enhancing the ent; dean designed phantom hands, 
which ravi implemented immediately; and most wonderful, ravi 
implemented the change management system for smalltalk (which 
dean tells me is really new technology, no one in the smalltalk 
community has ever thought of doing change management this way, 
or this well). 

But wait! I'm not done with the big congratulations yet :-)) 
(the preceding is a symbol for a very big smile). Hill finished 
the grandmap (in smalltalk; he wisely does not consider the job 
done till it's translated to C++). Congratulations also go to 
bill, who reworked the RPC transceiver towards allowing sensors 
to run over the network. Markm tells me that bill's solution 
to this problem is far better than markm had envisioned.
 
And an unusual mix of congratulations and condolences goes to 
hugh, who bore the brunt of the effort to recover from a surprise 
incompatibility between the PC and Mac versions of smalltalk 
(we've been using both). The wonderful news coming out of this 
effort is that as a side effect we stripped out lots of obsolete 
stuff from the smalltalk images--2MB worth. As a consequence, 
we will be able to continue to use the Macs for development (I 
had been in the process of grinding to the terrible conclusion 
that we would have to buy many Sun smalltalk licenses, for the 
virtual address space, which would have been very expensive).

Meetings: Macrs, bobp, revisions of the system overview. Markm, 
bill, RPC transceiver. Markm, ravi, bill, name mangling in stubble. 
Roger, dean, discuss the list of remaining tasks for an autofact 
demo. Roland, bobp, discuss ceran. Bobp, markm, clubs. Hugh, 
dean, fm. Bobp, joel, marcs, discuss Apple and smalltalk. Marcs, 
dean, joel, parc place strategy. Dean, michael, structured debug 
on the ent. Michael, dean, break up the ent for the disk on Wednesday. 
Michael, dean, markm, ravi, efficiency of internsets. Markm, 
hugh, dean, visibility & location of pseudoconstructors. Roger, 
hugh, dean, ravi discuss system independent attributes for the 
frontends  after fm does paragraphs.


Anyway, this week's task list is as follows:

A.       dean

x    1/30/90     unfiltered 1 level backfollow
x    1/30/90     designed phantom hands
     2/06/90     edit a run in fm
     2/13/90     selection display in fm
     2/13/90     second generation of fm done
     2/30/89     allocation sequence numbers
     2/30/89     printing sequence numbers

B.       hill

x    1/30/90     make an efficient mutable for the grandmap
     2/06/90     Cxx browser working again
     2/06/90     fileout, filein file organizations in the browser
     2/13/90     grandmap in C++
     2/30/89     write mail about X++ upgrades and garbage collection

C.       hugh

x    1/30/90     rebuild the incompatible smalltalk images, save 2MB
     2/06/90     build schnerts to hook up fm and waldoes
     2/13/90     make compiles work on the mac
     2/23/90     make tables self copy
     2/23/89     text display from xanadu on mac
     2/30/89     make tables lazy on comm line
     2/30/89     update broadcast

D.       markm

x    1/30/90     may protocol written not tests
     2/06/90     may semantics tested
     2/06/90     move to new image
     2/06/90     endorsement records
     2/06/90     document critical_block macro in X++
     2/13/90     lunch bet on club security
     2/13/90     club febe visibility
     2/13/90     initial doc of public club
     2/13/90     enforcement of clubs
     2/20/90     filtered backfollow
     3/13/90     respond to semantics email
     3/13/90     merge necromancers with dependencies
     3/13/90     merge necromancers with counted pointers
     3/20/90     complete to do list from alpha 3

E.       marcs

x    1/30/90     sun smalltalk negotiation with parc place
x    1/30/90     3 mac licenses of smalltalk
x    1/30/90     infofactory review for amix
     2/06/90     finish assessing the issues
     2/06/90     check patent issues for shipping the system overview
     2/06/90     merge algorithm
     2/24/90     rough draft of AMIX/Xanadu frontend comparison
     2/24/90     rough draft AMIX/Xanadu integration plan
     2/24/90     start second round of patenting work
     2/30/89     figure out whether links are standalone objects

F.       michael

     1/30/90     michael
     2/06/90     figure out ent

G.       ravi

x    1/30/90     phantom hands
x    1/30/90     change management
x    1/30/90     D&L to ent for backfollow
x    1/30/90     infinity solution
     2/06/90     fix backfollow
     2/06/90     link pane code design
     2/13/89     do comm in smalltalk
     2/13/90     tree orgls
     2/13/90     run fe to D & L across LAN on Sun

H.       bobp

x    1/30/90     assymetrix people and open book
     2/15/90     first shippable overview complete
     2/30/90     sensors in the overview

I.       roger

x    1/30/90     put tops on vlad
     2/13/90     type declarations in the ent
     2/13/90     translate fm
     2/13/90     follow a link
     2/20/90     get fm running under open look
     2/20/90     link lists with simple documents in alpha
     2/20/90     traverse to acad, traverse from acad

J.       roland

x    1/30/90     eliminate || in C++ except in complex situations
     2/06/90     fix remaining crutch issues
     2/06/90     install current crutch
     2/13/90     new version of formic
     2/30/90     write grammar for formic
     2/30/90     parser with expression semantics
     2/30/90     xlint check for assign to a parameter variable and assignment to "this"
     2/28/90     automatic documenter

K.       Bill

     1/30/90     RPC transceiver part done for sensors over comm
     2/06/90     fix exception handling with sensors between comm handlers

K.       Joel

x    1/30/90     new info packet draft
x    1/30/90     prep presentations for Bechtel and PC Forum
     2/06/90     call dave pollock at parc place

L.       Jacque

x    1/23/90     ken graham competitive searches
     1/30/90     prep to start writing user manual for infofactory

      Rick

x    1/30/90     cleanse self of involvement with presentation graphics

L.       Deferred Meetings:

     Dean, markm, region splay. 
     Roland, dean, discuss xlint commands in smalltalk. 
     Markm, hill, discuss explicit deletion of orgls & refcount deletion. 
     Markm, hill, discuss exception handling on sensors between comm handlers.
     Dean, roger, michael, markm, discuss sequence numbers of size 4 billion. 
     Dean, markm, discuss intersecting backfollow ideas. 
     joel, marcs, discuss terminology in X++ for developer release 
(particularly necromancers and related tools)
     Ravi, roger, discuss common view.

M.       Unassigned

     merge contact databases
     scenario documents (markm, dean
     integrating ent is a nasty problem
     How well will canopy rebalancing perform?
     Tumblers as subclass of partiallyOrdered
     tutorial for users on the frontend
     reference manual for users on the frontend
     test scaffolding, code exercisers
     rollin, rollout a la Univac
     subaccounts, permissions on FE
     sys admin, i.e., archiving and partitioning disks

--marcs