This is the mail archive of the ecos-discuss@sourceware.cygnus.com mailing list for the eCos project. See the eCos home page for more information.
>>>>> "Jimen" == Jimen Ching <jimen@adtech-inc.com> writes: >> Currently none of these are ready for general use. Development >> is ongoing, including the ability to run the test cases >> directly from the configuration tool. Jimen> I keep reading this. But for some reason, on going Jimen> development for ecos is not the same as on going Jimen> development for cygwin or egcs. With these other projects, Jimen> you see lots of activity on the mailing lists and you have Jimen> access to snapshots and the cvs tree. But with ecos, there Jimen> doesn't look like there's anything happening outside of Jimen> cygnus. Is it really open development, or is it just open Jimen> source? Jimen> I guess it is not a one-to-one comparison between ecos, Jimen> cygwin and egcs. Since ecos is a real-time OS, which may Jimen> require fault tolerancem while the other software does not Jimen> have to be as fault tolerant. But somehow, I get the Jimen> impression that the development model is not the same. ecos Jimen> seems to be a lot more closed. This is in large part due to timing. cygwin is on its twentieth release. I am not sure exactly when it started, according to its FAQ the tenth release happened in December 1995 and the third release happened so long ago that nobody remembers the details anymore. This means that they have had quite a few years to build up an active development community. The egcs project was announced in August 1997, so they have had over a year. Of course they had a very significant headstart because there were already very many people involved in the development of the various GNU compilers. eCos was released to the world on November 3 1998, so we have had just over two weeks to build up an active development community. To complicate matters further, during the first week most of the eCos development team at Cygnus was busy demonstrating the system at ESC West, and last week most of the team took a break to recover from the strains during the last few months to get the release out on time. We are very pleased with the web site and download statistics to date. We certainly want to see an open development process, because we believe that is the best way to move the system forward. Both anonymous CVS access and regular snapshots are planned, we have just not had the time yet to get these things in place. In the case of egcs I believe it took about five months before anonymous CVS access became available - if it takes us five weeks to do the same then I'll be happy. If in a year from now you still believe that eCos is just open source rather than open development than as far as I am concerned I'll have failed in my job. As explained in a number of earlier messages and in the FAQ, there is a caveat: Cygnus is not a charitable organization, it is a company. At times there are legal and commercial reasons for not disclosing certain information immediately. This caveat also applies to other projects at Cygnus, for example when the compiler group does a port to a new architecture this is not always announced immediately, but the work still becomes part of the public releases in due course. It is unfortunate that the eCos issues people are most interested in right now, e.g. which additional ports we will be working on, generally fall into this category right now, but the situation should be improving in the coming weeks. Bart Veer // eCos net maintainer