[Tinyos-devel] Re: CTP + LPL

[Philip Levis]

On Feb 9, 2008, at 1:03 PM, David Moss wrote:
>
>
> My first recommendation to help mitigate this problem is to create  
> a Best
> Current Practices TEP describing how a users and developers should  
> manage
> his or her project with the goal of avoiding conflicts on top of a
> constantly evolving open-source TinyOS code base.  It's doable: my  
> team
> manages several projects, each using different TinyOS baselines.   
> We've
> constructed our systems so major conflicts will not arise, even when
> upgrading to the latest random TinyOS snapshot.
>

Sorry for the delay, but...

This is a great idea. It will also implicitly spell out guidelines  
for changing core systems, as those changes will have to follow the  
expectations the BCP spells out.

> My second recommendation is for all baseline driver and library  
> developers
> to maintain the latest information about their own implementations  
> in the
> TinyOS Wiki as a means of communicating to users what changes to  
> expect when
> updating their local baseline.  This comes down to personal drive and
> willingness on behalf of the developer, but the wiki is probably  
> the best
> thing to happen to the TinyOS development process. Wiki  
> documentation can
> remain as flexible as the open-source implementations it supports,  
> which is
> mostly unlike our formal TEP process.  Expanding upon this, I  
> believe the
> CC2420 TEP I wrote should be done away with and turned into a set  
> of wiki
> pages which will allow the documentation to always reflect the  
> latest radio
> stack fixes and features.  I argue that TEP's should exist to help
> developers decide which mandatory interfaces need to provided by their
> implementations, not to constrain or reduce the set of functionality
> provided by an implementation.

This is interesting -- it suggests that HALs shouldn't be put in a  
TEP, as they are open to evolution. It places a nice boundary on what  
interfaces are for TEPs and what are for less formal documentation.

Phil