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From:
Date: Wed Dec 31 1969 - 17:00:00 MST


Hi guys,

In a couple of weeks, I would like to have a meeting with the
NCL/NCARG developers (not Dennis and Sylvia for this one) to discuss
the bigger picture of NCL, and where we see it a few years from
now. Some topics might be (in no particular order):

  1. In 5 years, we may lose people to retirement, or other natural
     disasters. What do we do with the codes that those people are
     responsible for? Is the code well-documented enough that somebody
     new could pick it up and continue development? We don't have a
     lot of duplication in our group, and I worry about what will
     happen to code development if we suddenly lose somebody.
     [Think of Glenn Davis in the netCDF group.]

  2. Open source plan for HLUs (do we need to do anything to code
     before it goes open source?). Same for NCL, which would be later.

  3. Should we overhaul the ymake system and use something more
     standard?

  4. What about the documentation? I lose sleep over this one. It
     needs to be overhauled, but we don't have staff.

  5. What are some other bigger plans for NCL that we haven't
     discussed, like HDF5, ? Do we need more people on our team to
     tackle some of them?

  6. Are there some better software engineering practices we could be
     using? For example, when a change is made in the code, it's hard
     to remember all the places you have update, like adding examples,
     updating man pages, updating various documents, etc. Can this be
     improved? What about coding standards?

  7. Any debugging tools, profilers you wish we had to make problems
     easier to track down?
 
  8. What about the business of having to create so many interfaces?
     We start off with a Fortran code, then we end up adding a C
     interface, a possible HLU interface, a GSUN interface, and then
     maybe Python.

This is a long list! I'm sure you guys might have more stuff to
add. As we did in the Matrix class, please let me know what you rate
as the top 5 issues (in order of importance and add your own if you
want), and I'll compile a list. I would like to hear from *everybody*
on this topic. When I've heard from everybody, I'll try to schedule a
meeting.

    [Being a "blue", I wanted to add some clever wit to this email to
     make it more enjoyable, but I'm just too tired after typing
     it. So think of something funny on your own. I'd appreciate it. I
     will probably have food at the meeting as per my "blue"
     tendencies.]

Many thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving!

--Mary

-- 
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Mary Haley                   


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