Tim,

On Thursday, August 7, 2003, at 08:12 PM, Tim Jenness wrote:

> JAC are purchasing a Mac OS X machine for testing (since we are getting

Excellent! Persons of taste and discrimination, clearly.

> putting the Starlink classic system onto it. Has anyone done this yet?

Nope. I believe Steve has had a couple of queries about this -- he
might know of some names.

> Who should we talk to?

I'm not volunteering. I don't believe that it'd be a massive task,
though. Did you know that Apple have released an X server for OS X.
Quite separately, I remember someone telling me (...ah, it was Matthew
Graham, who was at UCL? and just moved to CalTech) that AGI had been
ported to Quartz, the windowing technology the Mac now uses, so it
might be possible to do the Classic port natively.

> Obviously, if classic was in CVS this would be
> simplified enormously and Brad would be able to put the Mac patches
> into
> the repository (so that everyone would benefit). Has any progress been
> made on CVS?

Obviously -- no-one needs persuading about this. All we need is some
copious free time (and possibly an extra month between now and ADASS).

I plan to put autoastrom into the RAL CVS repository in the short term
(because Peter's planning to integrate it with GAIA and I don't want to
be rolling distributions all the time), and I plan to put Echomop, code
and cookbook, in there as well (because I've been promising the Echomop
folk that I'll do that for so long it's getting embarrassing). As part
of some other work I've been doing on autoastrom, I've started using
autoconf/automake/libtool to build parts of it. That works perfectly
well.

By the time I've put both of them in, it should be fairly clear what's
involved, and I/we can verify that there are no showstopping reasons
why it wouldn't be fairly mechanical to do the same work with other
applications (apart from the copious free time, of course). With that
done, we can start thinking about whether there are better ways of
rolling distributions and so on. That is, I don't believe this has to
be planned in _massive_ detail before something useful can happen.

When? I don't know. I don't think it should be hard to dump my local
repository into the RAL repository. Would that be enough to be going
on with? Probably, as a start, and once they're in there they could be
played around with reasonably safely. I don't _plan_ to spend much
time on this between now and ADASS, but I could probably be persuaded
to swap things around on the priority list.

Just while I've got everyone's attention. I'd thought of separate
trees for applications, docs, and third party stuff, so we'd have
/java/..., /applications/{echomop,...}, /docs/{sc3,...},
/3rdparty/{catlib,...} in the CVS root. Does that seem reasonable to
everyone?

If no-one squeals, I can go ahead and copy my repository tree over when
I next want something different to do. Yes?

See you,

Norman


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Norman Gray http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow [log in to unmask]