Re: [open-cobol-list] Roadmap for Open-Cobol-1.1

[Brian Tiffin]

Hello Jochen,

1) Can't speak to any roadmap.  Roger is lead and a good lead at that.  But, I 
believe this project is worthy of having far more than one or two main movers 
and shakers, so I speak up (and perhaps out of turn) on occasion.

OC1.1 is pretty solid, but there are edge cases that we, the developers, still 
need to find and figure, in my humble opinion.  This will require running 
lines of source through the compiler from a legacy point of view, and pushing 
the envelope a little (actually a lot) to see where the tool can lead and to 
get a handle on its capabilities.

I personally do not have a stash of legacy COBOL to work with. I've found a 
site, the SimoTime COBOL Connection http://www.simotime.com/indexcbl.htm that 
I use, time permitting, to try some of the trusted, well engineered COBOL 
sources out there using OpenCOBOL 1.1 and  I've been impressed.  Kudos to 
both SimoTime and OpenCOBOL.  I use the hex dump example on occasion and I 
plan on using the examples when I try and get my head around some of the more 
complex I/O options that OpenCOBOL and COBOL offers.  There is far too much 
to read and try on the COBOL Connection, but I find the samples to be very 
worthy trials.  Other developers can help here, reporting on passes of any 
legacy source and estimates of grief or glee expected.

On pushing the envelope.  While mainly interested in producing more 
documentation, I can't help but try out the potential of the OC1.1 tool.  So 
far, external scripting, accessing libraries (libcurl, GTK+, etc), embedding 
javascript, other miscellany and small scale but traditional COBOL have all 
impressed and pleased.  I see the potential as very close to unlimited.

A little bit on documentation.  It's going to take awhile.  :)  I like the 
look and feel of the ReST raw text source of the FAQ and feel it will allow 
for a fairly quick build up of OpenCOBOL docs.  Pandoc may come to the aid 
for generating more GNU compatible Texinfo source from what I've been working 
with, but this may require a little tweaking and I'm not sure if that 
tweaking would be more effort than straight up manual markup.  Parts of the 
FAQ are written in User Guide style, but this will build and will eventually 
be a completely separate document.

The reserved word coverage inside OpenCOBOL is vast and some form of reference 
manual will come, but it is a big job and I doubt that it will influence much 
of the 1.1 roadmap or timeline (perhaps 1.2 or 1.9 with whatever is available 
offered with or beside 1.1 and in the FAQ).

2) On the second issue.  I can speak a little to this.  If not just for fun 
and advocacy.  ;)  The pre release is updated quite frequently and there is a 
utility developed with OpenCOBOL itself to ease getting new copies.  The 
libcurl trials lead to an occurlrefresh.cbl file posted to the opencobol.org 
forums.  If you have a working 1.1, and libcurl, the application, while 
allowing any URL fetch to file, has defaults that will download an OC1.1 
tarball only if it is newer than any current local archive.  This is a simple 
modify time check that is built into libcurl, but is nice to Roger's servers, 
while ensuring the latest and greatest locally.

http://www.opencobol.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=285&forum=1#forumpost1630
 

And if that link is broken by email line limits, search for occurl on the 
opencobol.org site.

The package date of the bundle is accessible, after a make, as part of the 
cobc --version output on the newest versions.  I like running occurlrefresh 
on a fairly frequent basis, as it keeps things fresh without undue downloads 
and I trust any new pre release to be better than the last.  I have a few 
copies of archives, but I've never had need to backout of a posted update.

Hope that helped.

Cheers,
Brian

On September 17, 2008 03:38:49 pm Jochen Schmitt wrote:
> Hallo,
>
> I want to ask, if there any roadmap for the releasing of the
> upcoming stable release of open-cobol-1.1?
>
> As a second question I want to ask, if there was any changes in
> the uploaded prerelease of open-cobol-1.1.
>
> If there, I want to suggest to rename the tarball into
>
> open-cobol-1.1pre-%{timestamp}.tar.gz
>
> The placeholder %{timestamp} should have the format 'YYYYMMDD'
> for distinguish different prereleses.
>
> Best Regards:
>
> Jochen Schmitt
>