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Re: ECOS Re: test suites for eCos?



>>>>> "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