Hello,

Some more news:

23/04/96:

StrongARM Guidelines
--------------------
As you are all probably aware, we now have an SA-110 interfaced successfully
to the Risc PC OpenBus, and running RISC OS. Changes in the basic
architecture between the StrongARM and ARM Architecture 3 (ARM6xx, ARM7xx),
particularly with regard to the need for separate Icache and Dcache, require
that a set of style guidelines are required to ensure that code will run on
the SA-110, future Harvard-architecture StrongARMs, and the current von
Neumann-architecture processors. 

A set of preliminary coding guidelines has been released for developer use,
and is now available as reference/strongarm/prelim.txt on the Developer WWW
site; please pass any comments on this file back to me at the ISVQuery
alias. A more complete document should be made available sometime in the
next few weeks.

Developer Sales
---------------
Unfortunately there has been a series of minor hold-ups in the production of
a Developer price list; we hope to have this document online (finally!)
sometime either at the end of this week or early next. When it goes live,
you will find it in docs/sales/. Currently, the only way to find out
developer price for a given item is to telephone Developer Sales on +44 1223
577834, quote our developer number and ask for the price; as Sales have
direct access to the stock control system, they will be able to view the
records from which the price list is being built. When ordering, you can
find a Drawfile copy of the order form in docs/sales/; please make sure you
enclose your cheque with this form.

Mailing List Manager
--------------------
The principal developer mailing list manager is now live. I've set it up so
that, if you gave me a contact email address when you subscribed which
contained a definite domain owned entirely by your organisation, then anyone
with an address in that domain can subscribe; otherwise, only subscriptions
from the explicit contact address are permitted. For example, if the contact
address I received was support@foo.co.uk, then any (and multiple) users at
foo.co.uk could subscribe; however, contract addresses clearly associated
with other institutions (eg bar.ac.uk) or service providers where subdomains
cannot be differentiated (eg baz@compuserve.com).

If this causes a problem (eg if programmers affiliated to your organisation
wish to use the list but have addresses in a different domain), drop me an
email (at ISVQuery) with title "Mailing list admin" and the necessary
details, and I'll put them on the list.

To subscribe to the mailing list (the current one is named devgroup), send
an email to devgroup-request@art.acorn.co.uk with subject "subscribe" and
body text "subscribe devgroup"; if you don't receive a reply confirming your
subscription, let me know the details (especially the address the
subscription request was sent from). 

To use the list, you'll need to subscribe; nobody is subscribed to the list
by default.

Unsubscription works by a very similar mechanism; email
devgroup-request@art.acorn.co.uk with subject "unsubscribe" and body text
"unsubscribe devgroup".

I'm currently running the system with a very simple set-up; the server is
capable of producing periodic digests, etc, however I'm not sure tht all
these extra features are really necessary. Unless you suggest otherwise, I
plan to let the system runb for a while "as is", see how much use it gets,
and then possibly straw-poll the users at some later date. If this first
group takes off, I'll do some polling regarding suggestions I've received so
far (eg groups for developers who wish to swap info on contract programming,
etc).

More news as and when it happens; I don't think there will be a comms
meeting for a couple of weeks as PBondar is out of the office (on
honeymoon!), but some interesting things should be happening once he gets
back.

Regards,

Dave Walker

Engineering Support Manager