[Background: Cecil is a pure object-oriented language with multimethods and other nice features; Vortex is a compiled implementation thereof.]
I am strongly considering dropping this ITP. I realize that I could also change it to an RFP, but am uncertain that it is of sufficient user interest. Why? * Stagnation: although upstream still exists, they haven't pushed out a release since early 1999; this does not bode particularly well. * Few users: Although Cecil is a very nice language, it seems to be primarily of academic interest; AFAIK, the only major Cecil application is the compiler. As such, I suspect it will mostly be dead weight on the servers. * Resources: on i386, the compiler alone (without any supporting files) is a 27M executable. A full build is also rather time-consuming; my estimate is ~10 hours on my 256M Celeron-500. Granted, I am arranging things to spare the autobuilders from most of this work, but I'm still not convinced it's justified. * Fit: The upstream source doesn't have anything resembling "make install"; I'd basically have to stick everything into a big directory under /usr/lib, add some wrappers in /usr/bin, and hope that nothing still tried to write into the tree. (Upstream seems to assume a shared playground, which is fair enough for research environments but not really appropriate for Debian.) -- Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (finger [EMAIL PROTECTED])
