Monthly report A-A-P, August-September 2003

WRAPPING UP THE PLANNED WORK

September was the last month of the planned work, funded by Stichting
NLnet.  From now on I will have less time available for A-A-P.
Otherwise the project will continue in full speed.  Recent discussions
on the maillist are a good indication that the audience is getting
bigger.  And Aap is becoming more and more useful.


ZIMBU AWARD

To stimulate developers to help making Aap and Agide grow and improve
the Zimbu awards have been presented.  Everybody helping the A-A-P
project deserves appreciation, only three have been selected to get a
price.

A message with the announcement has already been posted, thus I will not
repeat that here.  A press release is also being send out, so that more
people may become interested in the project.

More info on the web site:
	http://www.a-a-p.org/zimbu_award.html


PROGRESS

For the final two months six items were planned to work on:

- Followup on the 1.0 release: Cleaning up, bug fixing, improving the
  documentation, including patches, updating the web site, etc.  This
  has taken a large amount of time, as was expected.  The robustness of
  Aap has improved.  Still, more tests should be added to further
  improve this.  This is ongoing work.
  
- An autoconf-like configuration feature has been added.  The
  cooperation with SCons worked out very well.  We now have a good base
  to further enhance the configuration commands.  This was done as
  planned.

- Installation of Aap and Agide has been simplified.  "aap --install
  aap" and "aap --install agide" now works on many systems.  The
  bootstrap setup of Aap has been explained step-by-step on the web
  site.  This part was finished as planned.

- The plan for version control was to support Subversion.
  Unfortunately, this work stalled as soon as I attempted to install
  Subversion on my system, because the FreeBSD port doesn't work well.
  I still intend to work on this, but it was not finished in the planned
  time.

- Support for packages has been improved.  More packages are now
  available and work on more system.  Support for Debian packages was
  added, but still has not been properly tested.  This work was done as
  planned.

- Automatically checking for dependencies has been improved.  The
  situation that an included file first needs to be created is now
  handled correctly, also when this needs to be done recursively.
  A few other problems were detected and solved while doing this.
  It is now simpler to add a dependency checker for another language by
  using the ":sysdepend" command.  The work was done in the planned
  time.

Additionally, the support for language modules and the ":import" command
was added.  This work was not planned, which explains why the work on
version control support could not be done in time.  The language module
support was developed in cooperation with several people, which showed
how well the A-A-P community works together now.


WHAT IS NEXT

The A-A-P project will continue as before, but without planned work.
It is now up to all developers to supply the patches and modules that
they consider appropriate for A-A-P.

There are plenty of things to work on:

- Support for more tools and languages.  All mechanisms are in place for
  this.

- More testing.  Python is a very flexible language, which means that
  problems are often not found until code is executed.  Unit tests can
  be added to make Aap more reliable.

- Security improvements.  When downloading files it should be possible
  to check that the files have been received intact.  Especially to
  avoid that a truncated download goes unnoticed.

- Improve the configuration features so that many autoconf scripts can
  be replaced.

- More packages.  There are plenty of examples now.  Once a package has
  been uploaded users can simply use "aap --install" and ":assertpkg" to
  install a tool.

For more ideas see: http://www.a-a-p.org/aaptodo.html

-- 
hundred-and-one symptoms of being an internet addict:
127. You bring your laptop and cellular phone to church.

 /// Bram Moolenaar -- [email protected] -- http://www.Moolenaar.net   \\\
///          Creator of Vim - Vi IMproved -- http://www.Vim.org          \\\
\\\              Project leader for A-A-P -- http://www.A-A-P.org        ///
 \\\  Help AIDS victims, buy here: http://ICCF-Holland.org/click1.html  ///


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