Release plans [was: Building packages with 21.5b29?]

[Rodney Sparapani]

> Rodney Sparapani writes:
>
>   >  I appreciate being brought into this discussion.  I'm going to be
>   >  tied up for a few months, but, in my view, FFI is the future of
>   >  XEmacs (is SXEmacs still around?  haven't heard much from them
>   >  lately).
>
> I believe so.  They have their own lists and stuff, so they only show
> up here when they have something important to say.
I thought they might speak up and jump on this brilliant suggestion :o)
> For R, I would think it's feasible, but I'm really not sure what net
> benefit that would have.  On the one hand, it's true that comint
> interfaces are pretty finicky.  But on the other, they're a lot more
> flexible than FFI would be for "on the fly" variations.  Dunno about
> OpenBUGS, I don't even know what it is (although I probably can
> guess).
Excellent question.  comint actually works pretty well as far as it goes.
But, somebody has combined R and OpenBUGS (a Bayesian statistical 
package that
has an indescribable interface) into BRUGS, but only on Windows.  I'd 
like to
extend that to additional platforms and I see FFI as one possible solution.
We are teaching our students that using Windows is necessary :o(  This is
a total reversal from when I went to school and UNIX was a necessity.
> For TeXmacs, I suspect it would be quite fiddly.  I guess you have in
> mind something like passing a buffer to TeXmacs for display?
Maybe I went too far with that.  I was just trying to give an
example of what might be possible with FFI.
>   >  I suppose we are talking about Linux only,
>
> No, we're talking about GCC on platforms which support GCC-style FFI
> (I forget whether this is libffi or not).  This includes at least
> Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X.  ISTR you had problems with it on Solaris,
> or were aware of problems on Solaris.  But it's not limited to Linux,
> for sure.
>
> In theory there should be similar facilities on other platforms like
> Solaris and BeOS, but somebody would have to port.
Right, I should have said GCC.  But, I also forgot to mention that the
OpenBUGS libraries are only available on Linux.  I guess we could
add Mac OS X via ELF loading http://osxbook.com/software/xbinary  But,
then I would want a Cocoa port and be able to designate the Meta key too
:o)

-- 
Rodney Sparapani       Center for Patient Care and Outcomes Research
Sr. Biostatistician               http://www.mcw.edu/pcor
4 wheels good, 2 wheels better!   Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)
WWLD?:  What Would Lombardi Do?   Milwaukee, WI, USA