Greetings DSDPers,
As some of you may know, one of my professional objectives upon
retiring from TI a little more than 6 months ago has been to penetrate
the academic environment -- an environment in which "embedded software
engineering" has too often been regarded as an oxymoron. To that end,
I've been spending an ever-increasing percentage of my cycles engaged
on several fronts here at UC Santa Barbara: from collaborating with a
PhD student creating a RTSC-based environment for deeply-embedded
applications targeting low-end (8/16-bit) MCUs, to interacting with
professors in the CS/CE departments sympathetic to embedded software
engineering and empowered to reshape the current undergraduate
curriculum.
[on a side-note, Eclipse does have a presence here at UCSB, though it's
not as central as it might be; rest assured, I'm working on that as
well]
Needless to say, these efforts have been at the expense of other items
on my plate -- including (but not limited to) kick-starting the d-pack
project; and realistically, I don't see the situation changing over the
next several quarters. Unless someone is willing to take the reins in
the near-term, perhaps we should somehow transform d-pack from a
yet-to-be-formally-launched project into more of a special-interest
group with an associated discussion forum; as you recall from the
original proposal, d-pack was not necessarily envisioned to become a
repository of code but rather a compendium of best-practices.
I do, however, believe the problem motivating d-pack remains a very
real one; it's just that I have "bigger problems" that I need to
address in the near-term. At the same time, I can anticipate scenarios
down-the-road when the provisioning challenges that d-pack purports to
address will become front-and-center for me as well; and we should do
everything we can to provide a forum where practitioners *now* using
technologies such as P2 in an embedded context can at least share their
experiences with others (including me!!).
Comments??? Suggestions???
Bob.
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