26/9/03.
David et al,
> Firstly, apologies to Mark if I have misunderstood him, but if not,
> shouldn't we be very worried about this? It seems to me very important
> that people should be able to download just the bits of STARJAVA which
> they want. Getting the entire works when they only want a small part will
> be a big turn-off. Imagine if this was the case for classic starlink!
> "I want to use the CHR library, do I really need also to have KAPPA,
> FIGARO, GAIA, CCDPACK, etc, etc, etc?".
Well, to an extent this was the case with the classic Starlink stuff,
and moreover outside the Project the software was perceived to be even
more monolithic than it actually was. We even had a name for it: `the
sticky lump problem'. (Starlink software was a stickly lump; if you
wanted any of it you had to take it all.) This problem was a
major obstacle to getting Starlink stuff used outside the Project
(and, to repeat myself, though there was a genuine problem, the
perception from outside was worse).
I too have had very little to do with the STARJAVA work, but if it is
also a `sticky lump', then IMHO this is a serious problem which needs to
be addressed as a matter of some importance.
cheers,
Clive.
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Clive Davenhall Institute for Astronomy,
e-mail (internet, JANET): acd @ roe.ac.uk Royal Observatory Edinburgh,
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