Status of ayacc and aflex?

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> On Aug 30, 12:51 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> I actually have two slightly different versions of OpenToken; one for
>> GDS (my work project) and one for webcheck (a home project). I've been
>> waiting for an excuse to merge them; this could be it.
>
> Great news. In fact, since OpenToken seems dead upstream, you might as
> well adopt it for your own and host it on a public revision control
> system. Ada-France's monotone server is yours if you want it;
> otherwise you can go to SourceForge, Gna!, Berlios, Tigris or
> Savannah.

What are the tradeoffs between doing that, and becoming a Debian
maintainer for OpenToken? or both?

I'm familiar with SourceForge, and monotone, and I have a small public
website of my own. So it's not the mechanics of the public site I'm
concerned about. More the time it takes to respond to user queries.

I guess it depends on how popular the package becomes. Both public
sites and Debian packages are practically invisible without concerted
advertising campaigns, so I suspect there's not much difference.

I'm inclined to start with being a Debian maintainer, and only
establish a public website if there is more demand.

>> That's about to change; I'm finally fed up with Windows at home, so
>> I'm buying a new laptop with gNewSense (derived from Debian) on it.
>
> Congratulations. I hope you enjoy the experience. Out of curiosity,
> what is the difference between gNewSense and using only the main part
> of Debian (as opposed to contrib and non-free)?

Partly ignorance, partly politics.

I chose gNewSense because it is advertised as 100% Free Software (in
the GPL sense). For example, the wireless card won't work in the
laptop I'm getting, because there is no Free Software driver for it.

FSF established gNewSense because the main part of Debian is not 100%
free in this sense; see http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Features.

The politics is supporting a laptop/Gnu/Linux vendor that offers
gNewSense; I hope that promotes the cause of 100% Free Software in
some way - they can report one more customer interested in it. In
fact, they did say they are working on a 100% free wireless solution.

I'm hoping I can just use Debian apt-get to get updates, but I'm not
clear that will filter the stuff removed by gNewSense.

Eventually, I'd like to get a Free Software BIOS. That may be the only
way to avoid DRM, if the DRM advocates get their way. The book
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge presents a scary vision of such a thing;
you can't even order a pizza without a trust certificate, and Gnu Hurd
is illegal, but the choice of hackers. No mention of Debian .

Explicitly supporting gNewSense is one way to encourage Free Software
BIOS development. At least I tell myself that .

--
-- Stephe

Stephen Leake writes:
> Ludovic Brenta writes:
>
>> On Aug 30, 12:51 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I actually have two slightly different versions of OpenToken; one for
>>> GDS (my work project) and one for webcheck (a home project). I've been
>>> waiting for an excuse to merge them; this could be it.
>>
>> Great news. In fact, since OpenToken seems dead upstream, you might as
>> well adopt it for your own and host it on a public revision control
>> system. Ada-France's monotone server is yours if you want it;
>> otherwise you can go to SourceForge, Gna!, Berlios, Tigris or
>> Savannah.
>
> What are the tradeoffs between doing that, and becoming a Debian
> maintainer for OpenToken? or both?

OpenToken already has a Debian maintainer, his name is Reto Buerki[1],
so there is no requirement for you to maintain the package in Debian.
You may, of course, offer to co-maintain the package with Reto.

[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/opentoken.html

The one thing that OpenToken lacks is an active upstream author and
web site. The web site should have:

- a public source code repository
- a public bug database
- optionally, a mailing list.

Since there are currently few users, I proposed the "lightest"
solution requiring near zero set-up time:

- Ada-France for the public source code repository (possibly with
mirrors, since monotone is distributed)
- the Debian bug tracking system as a public bug database
- comp.lang.ada as the mailing list (supplemented by each bug in the
Debian BTS, which is a mailing list on its own).

> I'm familiar with SourceForge, and monotone, and I have a small public
> website of my own. So it's not the mechanics of the public site I'm
> concerned about. More the time it takes to respond to user queries.

As you have witnessed, there have been no user queries in years I
did send a couple of patches to the original author but never received
a response. These patches are in the Debian package.

Setting up a proper "upstream" site shouldn't take too much time but
that's still more than what I proposed.

> I guess it depends on how popular the package becomes. Both public
> sites and Debian packages are practically invisible without concerted
> advertising campaigns, so I suspect there's not much difference.

Yea, except that we're doing the advertising right now

> I'm inclined to start with being a Debian maintainer, and only
> establish a public website if there is more demand.

I agree with that.

>>> That's about to change; I'm finally fed up with Windows at home, so
>>> I'm buying a new laptop with gNewSense (derived from Debian) on it.
>>
>> Congratulations. I hope you enjoy the experience. Out of curiosity,
>> what is the difference between gNewSense and using only the main part
>> of Debian (as opposed to contrib and non-free)?
>
> Partly ignorance, partly politics.
>
> I chose gNewSense because it is advertised as 100% Free Software (in
> the GPL sense). For example, the wireless card won't work in the
> laptop I'm getting, because there is no Free Software driver for it.

> FSF established gNewSense because the main part of Debian is not 100%
> free in this sense; see http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Features.

I remember that time. There was opposition within Debian to removing
non-free drivers from the kernel, and even some flame wars. But the
Free Software advocates finally got their way, such that now the
kernel in Debian is split into the main, contrib and non-free sections
(i.e. they split the non-free drivers into their own packages). One
can use only the main section and get essentially what gNewSense
offers.

> The politics is supporting a laptop/Gnu/Linux vendor that offers
> gNewSense; I hope that promotes the cause of 100% Free Software in
> some way - they can report one more customer interested in it. In
> fact, they did say they are working on a 100% free wireless solution.

Could you please tell me who that vendor is? I'll be interested, come
time to replace my current laptop (which I got from HP with only
FreeDOS installed).

> I'm hoping I can just use Debian apt-get to get updates, but I'm not
> clear that will filter the stuff removed by gNewSense.

I guess you can use apt-pinning for that, but I'm not familiar enough
with the details of gNewSense to be positive.

> Eventually, I'd like to get a Free Software BIOS. That may be the only
> way to avoid DRM, if the DRM advocates get their way. The book
> Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge presents a scary vision of such a thing;
> you can't even order a pizza without a trust certificate, and Gnu Hurd
> is illegal, but the choice of hackers. No mention of Debian .
>
> Explicitly supporting gNewSense is one way to encourage Free Software
> BIOS development. At least I tell myself that .

Yes, at FOSDEM 2007 I attended Ronald G. Minnich's presentation of
LinuxBIOS[2]. From memory, the speaker is from Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory or similar, and uses LinuxBIOS on supercomputers.
The part I liked the most was when he described how Intel tried to
sell them their new and improved BIOS architecture into which hardware
vendors could add their own proprietary plug-ins. Guess what the
reaction was from people who simulate nuclear weapons on said
hardware?

[2] http://archive.fosdem.org/2007/sched...ents/linuxbios

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> Stephen Leake writes:
>> Ludovic Brenta writes:
>>
>>> On Aug 30, 12:51 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I actually have two slightly different versions of OpenToken; one for
>>>> GDS (my work project) and one for webcheck (a home project). I've been
>>>> waiting for an excuse to merge them; this could be it.
>>>
>>> Great news. In fact, since OpenToken seems dead upstream, you might as
>>> well adopt it for your own and host it on a public revision control
>>> system. Ada-France's monotone server is yours if you want it;
>>> otherwise you can go to SourceForge, Gna!, Berlios, Tigris or
>>> Savannah.
>>
>> What are the tradeoffs between doing that, and becoming a Debian
>> maintainer for OpenToken? or both?
>
> OpenToken already has a Debian maintainer, his name is Reto Buerki[1],
> so there is no requirement for you to maintain the package in Debian.
> You may, of course, offer to co-maintain the package with Reto.
>
> [1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/opentoken.html

Ok.

> The one thing that OpenToken lacks is an active upstream author and
> web site. The web site should have:
>
> - a public source code repository
> - a public bug database
> - optionally, a mailing list.
>
> Since there are currently few users, I proposed the "lightest"
> solution requiring near zero set-up time:
>
> - Ada-France for the public source code repository (possibly with
> mirrors, since monotone is distributed)
> - the Debian bug tracking system as a public bug database
> - comp.lang.ada as the mailing list (supplemented by each bug in the
> Debian BTS, which is a mailing list on its own).

Works for me. I can put a simple page on my current website stating
where things are. I can host a mailing list on my website if that
becomes necessary, like I have for Emacs Ada mode.

I'm currently focussed on adding a major new feature to monotone and
Emacs DVC, so I probably won't get to doing this for OpenToken for a
couple months. Unless I feel like taking a break .

>> I chose gNewSense because it is advertised as 100% Free Software (in
>> the GPL sense). For example, the wireless card won't work in the
>> laptop I'm getting, because there is no Free Software driver for it.
>
>> FSF established gNewSense because the main part of Debian is not 100%
>> free in this sense; see http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Features.
>
> I remember that time. There was opposition within Debian to removing
> non-free drivers from the kernel, and even some flame wars. But the
> Free Software advocates finally got their way, such that now the
> kernel in Debian is split into the main, contrib and non-free sections
> (i.e. they split the non-free drivers into their own packages). One
> can use only the main section and get essentially what gNewSense
> offers.

Ah, that makes sense. So http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Features is out
of date, or at least misleading.

>> The politics is supporting a laptop/Gnu/Linux vendor that offers
>> gNewSense; I hope that promotes the cause of 100% Free Software in
>> some way - they can report one more customer interested in it. In
>> fact, they did say they are working on a 100% free wireless solution.
>
> Could you please tell me who that vendor is? I'll be interested, come
> time to replace my current laptop (which I got from HP with only
> FreeDOS installed).

Los Alamos Computers http://laclinux.com/

There are several others that offer Debian; I got the list from the
debian.org website.

>> Eventually, I'd like to get a Free Software BIOS. That may be the only
>> way to avoid DRM, if the DRM advocates get their way. The book
>> Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge presents a scary vision of such a thing;
>> you can't even order a pizza without a trust certificate, and Gnu Hurd
>> is illegal, but the choice of hackers. No mention of Debian .
>>
>> Explicitly supporting gNewSense is one way to encourage Free Software
>> BIOS development. At least I tell myself that .
>
> Yes, at FOSDEM 2007 I attended Ronald G. Minnich's presentation of
> LinuxBIOS[2]. From memory, the speaker is from Lawrence Livermore
> National Laboratory or similar, and uses LinuxBIOS on supercomputers.
> The part I liked the most was when he described how Intel tried to
> sell them their new and improved BIOS architecture into which hardware
> vendors could add their own proprietary plug-ins. Guess what the
> reaction was from people who simulate nuclear weapons on said
> hardware?

Sounds like the current thread on emacs-devel about adding support for
dynamically loading C modules (dlls).

> [2] http://archive.fosdem.org/2007/sched...ents/linuxbios

I had not realized this was that far along. I'll bug LAC about
supporting it for Thinkpad.

--
-- Stephe

Ted Dennison, the author of OpenToken, reappeared yesterday on the AWS
mailing list and I took the opportunity to send him an email which he
allowed me to reproduce here for the benefit of all interested. The
conversation is below.

Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Hi Ted,
>
> Are you the author of OpenToken? There has been a discussion on
> comp.lang.ada starting at [1] about adopting it for future
> maintenance. As it turns out, Stephe Leake is willing to take it
> over. I'd like to know if you were aware of this and of the fact
> that, over the years sicne you released 3.0b, several people sent you
> patches which you never acknowledged. Do you approve of someone else
> taking over?
>
> [1] http://groups.google.com/group/comp....40447ce799fba1


Ted Dennison replied:
> I'm unaware of the talk. I am quite aware that I've been sent a few
> patches that I never had time to incorporate, and that it's not being
> actively developed. The birth of my second child pretty much killed all
> the free time I had to do such things. I now have a third, so the free
> time situation is even worse.
>
> I certainly approve, heartily, of anyone taking over development of it.
> The whole point of licensing it the way I did was so that such things
> could happen.
>
> One suggestion I would make to people would be to use a public source
> code repository. Among other things, that would make it much easier to
> distribute the burden of testing and incorporating patches. If I were
> starting such a project today, I'd definitely use Git for revision
> control. It works fine in Windows now, and Git makes forking around
> developers who get busy/lazy and drop out (such as myself) nearly
> trivial. I believe Savannah supports it, as do a few other lesser-known
> public hosting sites: http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitHosting.

and then in a second email:
> Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> Thanks a lot. Can I forward your reply to comp.lang.ada for the
>> benefit of all?
>
> Certainly.
>
>> The agreement is to use Ada-France's monotone server. Monotone is
>> also distributed, like git, but simpler to use, and it is written with
>> the Ada attitude whereas C is written with the C attitude
>
> Interesting. I'll have to look into that.

I just imported OpenToken versions 2.0 and 3.0b into the Ada-France
database under the branch name "org.opentoken". You can browse it at
http://www.ada-france.org:8081/branc.../org.opentoken

Stephe Leake, feel free to send me your monotone key so I can grant
you write permission on the database.

--
Ludovic Brenta.