RCONN@SIMTEL20.ARPA (Rick Conn) (03/26/85)
The following announcement documents some changes to the
Ada Repository and events which will be taking place over the
next several months. I thought the information would be of interest
to a fairly wide group, which is why this distribution was selected.
If you wish to subscribe to the Ada Repository mailing list, over which
announcements of software released to the repository are sent, please
feel free to send a request to:
ADA-SW-REQUEST@SIMTEL20
Upon receipt of this request, you will be added to the mailing list and
a welcome message which describes the operational aspects
of the Ada Repository will be sent.
Rick
---- Announcement Follows ----
Greetings, Everyone,
The recent silence on the ADA-SW list is about to be broken,
and I thought it would be good to take some time to explain what has
been going on and what is about to happen.
The Ada Repository is about to evolve. With this evolution
will come the following changes:
1. A new directory structure, organized by subject area.
To date, the number of submissions has been small
enough to permit effective use of the repository via
the five basic directories. I originally set up the
repository to support up to 1300 directories, and with
the new influx of software, more directories, with
meaningful names such as EDITORS and SPELLERS, will be
brought into existence.
2. The NOSC tools are to be delivered over the next
several months, and, thanks to the generosity of the
Naval Oceans Systems Center (NOSC), these 50+ tools
will be added to the repository. As a hint to the
magnitude of this submission, the four tools I have
seen so far amount to over 1 million bytes of source
code, documentation, and test programs.
3. Several other major sources of contributions to the
repository have come forth, including the Naval
Weapons Center and the new Software Engineering
Institute at CMU. I think we can expect several very
interesting and useful donations from them.
4. A "Repository User's Toolset" will be coming online in
the next two weeks which will address two fundamental
issues: (1) how does a user of the repository easily
determine what items of software are available and (2)
how is this software extracted and manipulated. Tools
will be provided to address these issues in an
automated, interactive fashion.
5. A revision of the documentation in the GENERAL and
POINTERS directories will be done. Additionally, the
survey that I promised some months ago will be sent
out (now that most users have had a chance to try out
the established mechanism), and you will be given a
chance to express your views thru this survey and
affect the direction of the repository.
6. The Ada Information Clearinghouse is establishing a
mechanism which will allow non-DDN users to access the
Ada Repository. More info on this when the mechanism
comes online.
This promises to be a time of change, growth, and improvement
in the operation of the Ada Repository on SIMTEL20. With our shared
data base of tools and software components, we can move closer TODAY
to one of the fundamental goals which inspired the creation of Ada in
the first place - the effective reusability of software and the
associated reduction in life cycle cost. Additionally, with the
promise of the new validated compilers which are targetted to micros
and even hosted on micros, Ada can be brought to everyone.
Richard Conn
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