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INTRO
This version of dist has been written by Raphael Manfredi based on
previous work from Larry Wall and Harlan Stenn.
HISTORY
I started working on this in September 1990 while I was still a student
at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne, France. From then on, I worked
during two years at ISE (building the Eiffel 3.0 compiler -- the run-time
part and code generation). Since I chose to use metaconfig for the run-time
library, which is written in plain C, I had the chance to continue improving
the whole dist package.
By the end of 1991, I contacted Harlan Stenn <harlan@mumps.pfcs.com> who had
been working separately on his own dist version. I started the painful merge.
At the same time, I started releasing alpha version of dist 3.0.
In 1992, I started a parallel project: mailagent. The dist 2.0 release upon
which this work is based included a simple perl script called mailagent, whose
sole job was to filter out @SH commands to automatically mail patches to some
people. I liked the idea of having a perl mail filter and so I extended
mailagent up to the point where it became really big and only marginally
dist-related. I released it on the net (comp.sources.misc) on July 1992, after
7 months of hard work.
In March 1993, I left ISE and returned to France to join ACRI. The dist 3.0
package was "almost" finished by that time, but the documentation was no
longer accurate and needed a lot of work. My new job does not give me enough
free time, so things have been longer than I expected.
In July 1993, under the pressure of many of my alpha testers, I decided to
go into the final process, sacrifying nights and week ends to finish up what
turns out to have been a 3 years process...
CREDITS
My first thanks will go to Larry Wall <lwall@netlabs.com> who wrote perl
and dist 2.0 in the first place. I would never have dived into dist 2.0
if it had not been written in perl.
During my work, I had the chance to benefit some useful comments and
contributions from Craig Kolb <craig@weedeater.math.yale.edu> who
has been the very first user of metaconfig (with a rather pre-historic
version). He used it on its rayshade 4.0 release (a ray tracing program).
Then of course, many thanks are due to my co-worker, Harlan Stenn
<harlan@mumps.pfcs.com>. Although I did the integration of his work all by
myself, I have found many good ideas in his early work. For instance, he wrote
the first implementation of the metalint program, something I could not live
without today! His remarks, comments and encouragements have always been
appreciated, even though we did not always agree on the same things at the
same time...
Then I would like to thank the many contributors to the metaconfig units.
I hope I'm not forgetting anybody! Here they come, in alphabetical order:
(sorted on the first name)
Andy Dougherty <doughera@lafcol.lafayette.edu>
Craig Kolb <craig@weedeater.math.yale.edu>
Graham Stoney <greyham@research.canon.oz.au>
Harlan Stenn <harlan@mumps.pfcs.com>
Jan Djarv <Jan.Djarv@sa.erisoft.se>
Larry Wall <lwall@netlabs.com>
Ralf E. Stranzenbach <ralf@reswi.en.open.de>
Scott Grosch <garath@engin.umich.edu>
Syd Weinstein <syd@dsi.com>
Thomas Neumann <tom@smart.bo.open.de>
Wayne Davison <davison@borland.com>
If I forgot your name, please let me know, and accept my apologies (not
necessarily in that order ;-).
Finally, thank you Shigeya Suzuki <shigeya@foretune.co.jp> for hosting the
dist-users mailing list. Send mail to majordomo@foretune.co.jp to subscribe.
Raphael Manfredi <ram@acri.fr>
Lyon, France, August 1993
[This section added by subsequent patches]
PATCHES
I'm grateful to the following people for sending me patches and/or reporting
bugs and giving me some suggestions (sorted on the first name):
Andy Dougherty <andy@crystal.phys.lafayette.edu>
Graham Stoney <greyham@research.canon.oz.au>
Ilya Zakharevich <ilya@math.ohio-state.edu>
Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@snakemail.hut.fi>
Joseph H Buehler <jhpb@sarto.gaithersburg.md.us>
Keith Walker <kew@timesink.spk.wa.us>
Scott Presnell <srp@cgl.ucsf.edu>
Wayne Davison <davison@borland.com>
Due to a mistake of mine, changes from Wayne Davison were flagged 'WAD',
but his middle initial being an 'E', new ones are now flagged as 'WED'.
Sorry Wayne, I did not know. We don't use middle initials here in Europe.
Special thanks to the perl5 Patch Pumpkin Holders (in chronological order):
Andy Dougherty <andy@crystal.phys.lafayette.edu>
Chip Salzenberg <chip@atlantic.net>
for their wonderful creativity. Perl5 is by far the largest metaconfig
customer with the widest audience, so Configure got run on a variety
of new platforms requiring specific fixes... which they provided,
thereby greatly enhancing the metaconfig "portability database".
Raphael Manfredi <Raphael_Manfredi@grenoble.hp.com>
Grenoble, France, February 1997
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