On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:40 PM, Uday Khedker <u...@cse.iitb.ac.in> wrote: > > > On Thursday 24 January 2013 12:35 AM, Richard Biener wrote: >> >> Uday Khedker <u...@cse.iitb.ac.in> wrote: >> >>> >>> I have been trying to do my stuff for a few years. We conduct a >>> programme called "Essential Abstractions in GCC" which is aimed at >>> taking a novice to a level from where she can do independent >>> experimentation with GCC internals. >>> >>> I put together a bunch of teaching assistants (about 15 of them) for >>> about 60 participants. Carefully designed programming assignments are >>> an >>> integral part of the training. The program ends with us summarizing the >>> essential abstractions in 17 or 18 pictures with the hope that if one >>> can understand the concepts represented by the pictures, one can walk >>> the maze of the GCC code. >>> >>> You can find the details of the latest offering at >>> http://www.cse.iitb.ac.in/grc/gcc-workshop-12/. >>> >>> I would like to take this training program to the next level but so >>> long >>> it remains my personal baby, my funding agency does not feel that I >>> have >>> accomplished much because they feel that if my program has any merit, >>> the GCC community would adopt it :-( >> >> >> Can you hint at what they would consider adopting it? I suppose it is not >> simply linking to it from the wiki or the website? > > > I know it sounds awkward but a government funding agency has its own notion > of what is "official" and what is "not official". In their eyes, the GCC > steering committee, the maintainers appointed by the steering committee etc. > are official. All others are hobbyists :-) > > But on a serious note, it would be great to view the course material as more > than documentation. The way there are "official" manuals and official code > available on the gcc website (I can't have my own manual and call it GCC > manual, or put up my code and call it GCC code), it would be good to have an > official courseware.
Anything I would consider "official courseware" would have to be contributed to and maintained by the community (of which you can play the main part of course). Now I don't know whether it is wise to try to ask the FSF if it wants to "have" it (probably not ...). I as member of the community would welcome such contribution and be happy to occasionally review the material for it's up-to-date-ness. There are technical details of the maintaining part - like would the material reside in SVN? Or in the CVS where we keep our webpages? Or somewhere else public (github?)? Would we want to have an official maintainer and use the usual patch / review / approve mechanism for changes? Which raises the question of the format the courseware is in? Gerald? David? > This is very different from putting it as one among so many other things on > the wiki. Look at it from the view point of a newcomer. There are so many > links and so many documents on the wiki that one does not even know where to > begin from. Can we have ONE course for newcomers (of course refined based on > the inputs from the developers) which the developers think represent their > knowledge well enough for the newcomers? I don't mean to remove other > material. We should have as much variety as possible but let there be one > agreed upon starting point. After achieving some maturity, a person is not a > newcomer and would be able to extract far more out of the other options that > exist anyway. Yeah, I know - the obvious link from the gcc.gnu.org page to click for a newcomer is 'contribute', but that page is awkward enough to scare off a possible contributor ;) Improving that front-door would be a good start (and this is an "official" part and not the wiki). Thanks, Richard. > I will be very happy to take the responsibility of taking inputs and keep > refining my material until we have something that we all feel is better than > anything that we have had so far. > > That is what I mean by adoption of the training program. > > While I may not like what funding agency says, I do see a valid point in > their expectations: They ask me "How have you influenced the GCC movement?". > They are smart enough to know the difference between what I have done and > whether the GCC community cares about it or not :-) > > Uday.
