Proposed new feature: Provers

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Aug 09, 2008 at 09:15:16PM -0400, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> The "Provers" work wasn't just a few random packages with no purpose.
> The point is to get a suite of tools to people who are trying to build
> _highly_ reliable software/hardware (e.g., where ANY error is
> likely to kill lots of people, etc.).  You end up needing a suite of tools,
> and we've also been working hard to improve how they work together.

I'm in total agreement.

Being able to build software which is reliable is something I'm very
interested in.  There are many steps to making software which never
fails -- from choosing the right processes, statically checking the
code, dynamically testing it, proving individual code modules and
combinations of code, building up a set of "learned mistakes" and
being able to apply those to new code -- and there is a lot of
software which can help apply this.

And if I was going to choose a distribution to use to write software
for rockets, airplanes & nuclear power plants, then I'd want one where
all this software is available.

So, definitely this is a good _feature_ for Fedora.

Rich.

PS. Interesting popular article about software reliability at NASA:
  http://www.fastcompany.com/node/28121/print

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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