Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!rutgers!mailrus!umich!itivax!scs
From: scs@itivax.UUCP (Steve C. Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.elm
Subject: Re: Elm will become a HP-UX standard
Message-ID: <285@itivax.UUCP>
Date: 30 Sep 88 15:21:43 GMT
References: <1000004@hpycla.HP.COM> <9861@tness7.UUCP> <556@hptsug2.HP.COM>
Reply-To: scs@itivax.UUCP (Steve C. Simmons)
Organization: Industrial Technology Institute, Ann Arbor
Lines: 42

In article <556@hptsug2.HP.COM> taylor@limbo.ptp.hp.com (Dave Taylor) writes:
>	 . . . In my view we have an unprecedented
>	situation, where a large corporation is willing to go through
>	the significant effort involved in bringing the code up to
>	Hewlett-Packard Release Quality and THEN RELEASE THAT VERSION
>	OF THE SOURCE TO THE PUBLIC.
>
>	Instead of us fighting about which version should be the base
>	version, I suggest that we try to be a bit more constructive
>	and have the HP people send a copy of their modifications to
>	the Usenet folks, and the Usenet people arrange for a very up-
>	to-date copy of their version of Elm to be transferred to HP
>	in Japan.

Hear hear.  My initial reaction to the notice from HP Japan was somewhat
negative.  On more thought (largely stimulated by Dave's article) it
seems we have a possibility of getting the best of all worlds.  The only
thing required is that all parties be co-operative.  Given that we've
managed to do so in finding moderators, beta-testers, etc, etc, surely
we can include one more obviously-willing-to-co-operate group in there.

So to address their original points:

Given that elm has gone thru a number of changes between the 1.[57]
release and what is forthcoming from comp.sources, the next set of
work to be done ought to be to rationalize any changes that HP Japan
has made into the elm stream.  There are two ways to approach this:

The HP japan folks could abandon their current stream and instead
merge/rationalize their changes into some future minor release of
elm.  This gives us a single development stream but may cause
problems with "feature conflict".  It's probably quicker.

The other is to keep 2.1 as is, and keep adding features/fixes
as people out in netland find them.  This continues the 2.X stream.
The HP Japan folks, in co-operation with our moderator here, start
work on 3.0, which should re-merge the two streams.  This is more
work, but would probably be less trouble long term.
-- 
Steve Simmons		...!umix!itivax!scs
Industrial Technology Institute, Ann Arbor, MI.
"You can't get here from here."