Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1999 20:23:57 +0100 (MET) From: Andreas Zeller <zeller@ips.cs.tu-bs.de> To: DDD Announcements Mailing List <ddd-announce@ips.cs.tu-bs.de> Subject: [ddd-users] [ddd-announce] Andreas retires from DDD (well, partially) Hi! I am Andreas Zeller, the guy whose name you see whenever you start DDD, the Data Display Debugger. Dorothea Luetkehaus and myself have written DDD, and I am its primary maintainer. DDD (http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/) has suceeded beyond my wildest dreams. Starting as a simple university project, DDD has become the most frequently recommended Linux debugger, and also become one of the most widely used Unix debuggers. There's an estimated 250,000 people using DDD, and with the rise of Linux, there will be even more in the future. In the last two years, I have devoted a large portion of my daily duties to maintain and extend the DDD source code, but also to answer DDD-related questions, to help people out of trouble, to manage DDD binaries, etc. etc. The mailing archive at the DDD WWW page lists several thousand messages; right now, I keep getting about 5-10 messages/day. Unfortunately, I can no longer keep pace with the incoming stream. Since January, I have started a new research project that takes much of my time and effort. (I make my living as a researcher, so I must do some research from time to time.) Even worse, my research group and myself will soon relocate to the University of Passau (a scenic city at the junction of Inn and Danube). Due to this relocation, I won't be able to do any DDD work between March and May, 1999. In the long term, I will continue to coordinate DDD source code and releases, but I won't be able to give support as before. So, I'm calling for volunteers that can assist or replace me in the following areas: * Binary support. In future, I won't be able to maintain the archive of DDD binaries, as it exists today. If someone is willing to set up and manage an archive of DDD binaries, please let me know. Eventually, I'd like to have a number of people each competent in building DDD for a specific platform. These people might also be able to assist users for DDD problems on that platform. Maybe we can have individual WWW pages `DDD on Linux', `DDD on Solaris', etc. * User support. There are 2-5 times more mails to `ddd-bugs' than to `ddd-users'; but most of the `ddd-bugs' mails are simply calls for assistance. I am thinking about simply forwarding mails sent to `ddd-bugs' to the `ddd-users' mailing list. This would allow for `me too' replies from users who have similar problems (and maybe solutions). Please let me know what you think about this; note that there is still `ddd-announce' if someone wants a less verbose mailing list. * Debugging. I have access only to a very limited number of machines and configurations. There is a number of recently reported bugs which I cannot track down, due to lack of an appropriate environment. Most of these problems do not require any knowledge of DDD internals, but some Motif or OS knowledge. I'd like more people to get involved into this process; please let me know if you can help. * Bug tracking. The current mechanisms for managing bug reports are just a flat ASCII file and a mailing list archive. In the long term, I'd like to have more elaborated bug tracking system where users and developers can enter and query bug reports via some WWW interface. I know of open source projects that maintain these beasts; I for myself lack the resources to set up such a thing. If you are willing to cooperate here, please let me know. Of course, I will continue to maintain DDD as long as I can. But there's a number of things I'd like to get done, and I cannot do these all alone on a 24-hour day. So if you have some spare time and enthusiasm for DDD, please contribute. Andreas Zeller (Please redistribute this article!) -- Andreas Zeller Technische Universitaet Braunschweig, Germany mailto:zeller@acm.org http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/~zeller/ ----- This message is brought to you via the `ddd-announce' mailing list. 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