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Date:Fri, 27 Feb 2004 23:33:54 +0000 (UTC) 
Subject:Re: 15.53 - Windows Installer Available 
From:jeffb 
Volume-ID: 

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Brent,

[You wrote]
>From a security standpoint I agree with you, but if I
>was working on a hardened configuraion I wouldn't
>install precompiled software at all.
>
>In fact, I might not even use Poplog if it will only
>bootstrap via an existing Poplog compiler.  You've no
>doubt seen (IIRC) Kevin Ritchie's hack to a C compiler
>to recognize when telnet was being built and insert a
>back-door...
>

I will have to go and have a look.

Since Poplog is largely written in Pop-11, it would be comparatively 
easy to do something similar. The content-verification issue is 
something we are going to have to address.

>Debian uses a format called "deb" that performs a
>similar role to RPM.  The RPM and Debian people have
>been collarorating off-and-on for a while on a unified
>format, but I don't think much real progress has been
>made recently.
>

I assume that with both, you point a tool at a directory and say, build 
with everything below this point? Is there any verification mechanism, 
against a previous build or database, to at least log new or missing 
files?

>
>Short Intro:
>

Thank you.

I'm a software engineer with my own (very) small firm. I tend to work on 
n-tier systems, against a variety of relational database management 
systems, with C/C++/TCL on the server and, most frequently, VB on the 
client. At times, I've been working on Graham Technology's GT-X 
software, scripting front-ends and writing or supporting service 
objects, or improving installations' administration scripts. I get to do 
a lot of shell scripting, lots of database interfaces, and endless SQL 
(although that usually means a missing index).

I am told that many of my fellows like to specialise on either the 
server- or the client-side of development, hence I get demand from a 
wide range of industries.

I've always liked to play with user interfaces, operating systems, 
databases and programming languages and nearly used Poplog for my final 
year undergraduate project, many years ago, before plumping for DEC-10 
Prolog. I got to play with Pop soon after graduating and, amongst other 
things, developed a little graphical version of a network editor, using 
Pop-11 with the X toolkit, based on original work by John Kellett who 
used SunCORE and SunVIEW. Other than this, my experience as a Poplog 
user is quite limited.

I have similar concerns about the quality of software and difficulty of 
managing a source base. I make extensive use of generators, operating on 
database schemas, record-type definitions, protocol packet schemas, 
etc., and I have recently begun investigating practical, simple, 
portable refactoring and restructuring tools that I can throw at any 
project.

Many of my clients have a constantly changing set of requirements, and I 
need to be able to manipulate the code case to meet those requirements. 
"Programming" is not always the solution - manipulating a code base, 
like any other data-type, possibly may be. All those implicit 
relationships in the code base need to be rendered explicit, and then 
they can be managed.

I'd like to see source code tagged, so that I can hide the annotations 
when they get in the way, work on just the code that matches a specific 
sub-set of compiler directives, and add links to requirements, while the 
editor silently manages explicit links to match all the implicit ones I 
create every time I add another token to the source stream. I currently 
see much of the problem domain as a set of inter-related name-spaces 
linked by mapping functions, and a source editor and linguistically 
expressed code don't give me the control I crave. Describing a network 
using language takes so damned long and is a pain. I want to construct 
and manipulate it, and limit the use of language to the queries I use to 
express the subset of the information I need at any given time. But 
then, except when writing, I sometimes tend towards the autistic and/or 
introverted, so perhaps this is just my little problem!

Poplog has potential for providing me with the cross-platform tools I 
want to apply to a wide range of languages and environments. It is 
particularly appropriate for linguistic manipulation and has a variety 
of parsing and list manipulation functionality as standard. A universal 
parser is just a general mechanism, maintaining networks of name-spaces 
and a collection of specific data sets, with recognisers and 
manipulators feeding off the data to support intelligent editing, 
querying, syntactic and semantic checking, long before the compiler is 
required to be fed a single morsel of code. Or so I hope. (To date, 
almost all of my experiments have used VB which, due to 
over-familiarity, I can throw onto a screen faster than any other 
language I type. I'd like to change that.)

Regards,
- -- 
Jeff

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