| [dsdp-pmc] disposition of d-pack |
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Greetings DSDPers, As some of you may know, one of my professional objectives upon retiring from TI a little more than 6 months ago has been to penetrate the academic environment -- an environment in which "embedded software engineering" has too often been regarded as an oxymoron. To that end, I've been spending an ever-increasing percentage of my cycles engaged on several fronts here at UC Santa Barbara: from collaborating with a PhD student creating a RTSC-based environment for deeply-embedded applications targeting low-end (8/16-bit) MCUs, to interacting with professors in the CS/CE departments sympathetic to embedded software engineering and empowered to reshape the current undergraduate curriculum. [on a side-note, Eclipse does have a presence here at UCSB, though it's not as central as it might be; rest assured, I'm working on that as well] Needless to say, these efforts have been at the expense of other items on my plate -- including (but not limited to) kick-starting the d-pack project; and realistically, I don't see the situation changing over the next several quarters. Unless someone is willing to take the reins in the near-term, perhaps we should somehow transform d-pack from a yet-to-be-formally-launched project into more of a special-interest group with an associated discussion forum; as you recall from the original proposal, d-pack was not necessarily envisioned to become a repository of code but rather a compendium of best-practices. I do, however, believe the problem motivating d-pack remains a very real one; it's just that I have "bigger problems" that I need to address in the near-term. At the same time, I can anticipate scenarios down-the-road when the provisioning challenges that d-pack purports to address will become front-and-center for me as well; and we should do everything we can to provide a forum where practitioners *now* using technologies such as P2 in an embedded context can at least share their experiences with others (including me!!). Comments??? Suggestions??? Bob. |