Welcome to new Mirage developers

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks,

Mirage development has recently escaped from my little lab and is including 
more people, so I just wanted to send out an introduction mail to say who 
everyone is.

- Richard Mortier is a lecturer at Nottingham, and he's been hacking on the DNS 
stack and OpenFlow support, among other things.
- Dave Scott is a developer of the Xen toolstack at Citrix, and is interested 
in using Mirage for specialised Xen stub domains (e.g. a block-level proxy)
- Balraj Singh is a visitor in Cambridge for the next while, and will look at 
various aspects (possibly Ensemble integration for distributed communication)
- Éireann Leverett is starting a PhD in Cambridge in the new year, and is 
looking at DNS and DNSSEC integration 
- Thomas Gazagnaire is the author of the dynamic typing extension, 
Caml-on-the-Web and many other bits of Mirage. He's working at OCamlPro doing 
consultancy at the moment.
- Raphael Proust will join the Lab as an intern from next week, looking at 
integration of a cool new linear-typing extension for the network stack (called 
LinearML), and possibly ocsigen/js_of_ocaml support.

The focus for this summer is to get a developer preview out with decent 
documentation, as Richard, David and I will be doing a tutorial on Mirage 
("building a functional OS") at ICFP in late September [1], so this gives us a 
nice relaxed deadline over the summer to tidy up and document much of the 
existing code.

I've just merged in the last big change to the core framework: switch from the 
MPL domain specific language, over to Richard Jones' bitstring syntax 
extension. This has pros and cons, but overall I'm much happier that I don't 
have to maintain MPL any more, and we can use the native OCaml 'string' type 
for packet parsing (old hands such as Thomas will appreciate that Istrings have 
now disappeared).

Anyway, we had a productive day with Balraj and Eireann both getting Mirage 
compiled and running, and I've also got a couple of test boxes running Xen all 
set up in the Lab now, for use to use as we desire.  This list is intended for 
day-to-day questions and discussion and is open and archived; if the volume 
gets too high (which is doubtful!), we can open up smaller sub-lists.

cheers
Anil

[1] http://cufp.org/conference/sessions/2011/building-functional-os