| Title | variety design does not meet requirements of open-source MPS |
| Status | closed |
| Priority | essential |
| Assigned user | Richard Kistruck |
| Organization | Ravenbrook |
| Description | variety design does not meet requirements of open-source MPS. Now MPS is open-source, perhaps we should ship internal varieties with debug symbols; or with debug symbols for the open-source parts anyway. |
| Analysis | Related jobs: job001248 (source clarity) Badly named CHECK macros in config.h... Historical related jobs: job001157 [INVALID] variety white-hot has asserts job000534 checking varieties don't job001545 hot varieties still don't job001546 hot varieties gather stats! RHSK 2005-10-21 Note: "old" means the variety and check system present before 2005-10. This job implements the "new" design. The old variety design, and check design, attempt to re-encode the fundamental possibilities into a prepackaged, easy to use 'menu', but based on decisions that are out of date. Time to go back to the fundamentals and rethink. Meta-note: And don't think we'll get it 'right' this time either. Keep it simple. Don't pre-purchase flexibility at the cost of cheap future adaptability. 3 fundamental areas of choice for a variety: Code-generation. Approximately a spectrum, the extremes are: - Full Debug (easy for a source code debugger to use); - Fully Optimised. Checks written in source code. Very flexible, not a simple spectrum*, and under our control. Partly a variety issue, partly dynamically adjustable at run-time. Effectiveness of checking is a huge factor in reliability and productivity. A vague idea of requirements will produce a bad checking model. We need proper use cases, to get proper reqs, to get a system that gives excellent support for dev and maint. (*: viz: ci, ti, ii, yuk!). Stripping. Commercial clients may require symbols to be stripped. This remains a requirement even though we also provide open-source copies of MPS. (This is the old "External" as opposed to "Internal" distinction). |
| How found | unknown |
| Evidence | Raw notes from Configura workshop <http://info.ravenbrook.com/mail/2005/02/28/12-40-49/0.txt>. |
| Observed in | 1.105.0 |
| Created by | Richard Kistruck |
| Created on | 2005-03-10 03:23:00 |
| Last modified by | Richard Brooksby |
| Last modified on | 2012-09-21 20:42:27 |
| History | 2005-03-10 RHSK create 2005-10-21 RHSK Analysis: 3 fundamental areas of choice for a variety. 2006-12-13 RHSK Note more related jobs. |
| Change | Effect | Date | User | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 179279 | closed | 2012-09-05 18:44:44 | Richard Brooksby | Merging branch/2012-08-15/variety-reform. |