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.
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.
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.
