The Tunes Review Subproject
Contents of the Review Subproject
Here are the current contents of this HLL project:
The Goals of the subproject
Reviewing other projects:
What Tunes should do:
- Features the system will have.
- Complete concrete Examples of how the system
will work, that revolution the way we use computers.
(also read the motivation article
"Why a new OS ?")
Goals of the Review subproject
The goals of this Review
Subproject
are to review all existing computing systems
and computing system elements,
and determine what is good or bad about them,
what they lack, and what they do that they shouldn't,
so that the Tunes project may benefit
from their experience,
be it good or bad.
To Do on this page
- Enhance the Contents
- A first thing would be
to sort out all the pointers
included at the end of documents in TO DO lists,
identify the pointed documents,
and incorporate the pointer with a short descriptive comment
at an appropriate place in the main text.
- Find material to Review for the subproject:
Collect names, addresses, papers, about all existing related projects
in the world outside of the Tunes project and add pointers to them.
- Add pointers to examples, files, etc,
from other subprojects that are part of Tunes.
- Actually read the above-pointed material,
and publish reviews about them all,
about how they are related to each other,
about how some of the aspects of some systems
are unified or not in some other existing or projected system,
about how well they perform,
about how they are expected to evolve,
about what are their virtues and shortcomings,
about what are intrinsic
(that come from their internal, physical, logical structure)
and extrinsic (that come from their place in the world's
political, economical and social structure).
That is, analyse these systems,
comparing them not only to each other,
but also to any imaginable alternative.
- Make proposals about what to keep, throw away, modify or extend from
these existing software:
synthetize the specification of a better software platform.
But as soon as some synthesis is done,
it will be incorporated into some other appropriate subproject
of Tunes, and pointed to by the Review...
- Enhance the Container
- The structure of the published documents should be redesigned.
- Currently, they are basically a linearly structured text
with a bit of low-level layout information,
and some low-level "hyperlink" references to other texts.
That's what they call "hypertext",
and that's better than raw text,
but not much.
- They should be transformed into a database
of languages, OSes, tools, articles, bibliographical references,
comments, glossary references, etc.
- The glossary should become part of this database, too.
It would be of part the synthesis aspect of the subproject.
- Even if you don't know how to implement the database,
perhaps you could help design it:
- what should it be like;
- how would you like to be able to use and maintain it;
- what kinds of entries should there be;
- what criteria to use when searching;
- what should be individual information packages,
- and what should be their characteristics?
- What syntax would you like to use,
- Beware that in a first time,
we'll have to cope with a batch-oriented text-based interface;
but as soon as the system is bootstrapped,
it will become interactive...
back to the Tunes Subproject tree
back to the main Tunes page
Subproject coordinator:
Faré
-- rideau@clipper.ens.fr