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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/
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