[Swift-devel] Mailing lists, documentation update, etc.

[Mihael Hategan]

Hi,

I believe that there are a few issues that need some attention.

The first one is the email from systems that our mailing lists are going
to be retired. While I don't think that is a good idea, since those
lists provide both branding for the CI as well as a convenient/painless
setup for CI projects, it is probably happening for a good reason.

So, we need to find a new place to host our mailing lists and then save
our archives and transition to the new lists. Ideas welcome.



Second is documentation. I'm still writing, but it is now more than just
the skeleton that it was. You can see a snapshot here:
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~hategan/docs/trunk/ug/ug.html

I welcome feedback on the overall structure and organization at this
point. Also, if you want to contribute a section that is missing, or
find certain sections to be unpalatable, let's discuss. Please don't
bother noticing small things, such as broken links. Almost all links are
broken because I just put placeholders there. They will be fixed
systematically once the text is written.



Finally, while writing docs I had the chance (or the mental discomfort)
of trying to explain why certain things just don't make much sense. For
example, we say that variables are single assignment, but defining what
exactly an assignment is can be messy. If you have some file input, you
don't really assign to the corresponding variable. In fact, the fact
that you don't make any explicit assignments is what makes the variable
an input variable which in turns makes it assigned though the mapping
declaration. This kind of Catch-22 design bothers me.

Swift/T deals with the issue in a nice way (as far as I understand).
Inputs are always assigned through a file() constructor. This is more
elegant, at least for inputs. We should probably do the same: provide
file(), <T> T glob(), etc, and restrict the traditional mappers to
outputs. Mike will probably like the unifying idea. Anyway, I'll try to
write these things down once I'm done with #2 and we can discuss them.

Mihael