[Portland] Summarize current plan?

[Jeremy White]

Hi folks,

As a designated ISV rep, I spent some time this morning
trying to learn enough to comment intelligently on the
current state of the art.

I started from John's 'consistent messaging' email,
and perused the links as though I were an outside ISV
coming to this new.

The Wiki page read reasonably to me, a bit thin,
but nothing alarming.

I downloaded the source and played with it for a bit,
and also drilled into it a bit just using the ViewCVS
interface.

I think it could use some documentation love before
John ships his current email.

Specifically, the entire dapi module is largely unmotivated,
and I think a STATUS or README should be added to the
dapi/ directory asap.  (I know that the high level README just points
to the Wiki, but afaict, the Wiki has no doco on dapi
itself).

And what I was hoping could go into that document
were the answers to the following questions that I have:

  1.  What is the dapi?

  2.  Am I meant to bundle it with my app, or
      do I expect to find it already installed on
      a Linux distro?

  3.  How do I link to and invoke the API?

      (I could find no header prototype of Init
      in any .h file; took me a minute to find
      lib/.libs/libdapi.a.  A simple foo.c
      that invoked dapi_Init() seg faulted).

  4.  What is here, and where is it going?

      I think it is vital to say somewhere really
      quickly and early that this is an experimental
      prototype and lots *will* change and that
      much more will come.

Cheers,

Jeremy