We had a meeting of the Mercury group on Fri July 20, 2001.

Attendees:
	Zoltan Somogyi (zs)
	Simon Taylor (stayl)
	David Overton (dmo)
	Mark Brown (dougl)
	Peter Stuckey (pjs)
	David Jeffery (dgj)

1. CVS issues

	- It would be better for CVS log messages relating to branch
	  merges to be placed in a separate log, since they take up a
	  lot of space but give little information.
	
	- Files tend to get put into the papers directory with
	  permissions set incorrectly.  We should make the permissions
	  check part of the CVS commit script also apply to the papers
	  directory.

2. Documenting introduced names

	Any new and existing procedure names that are introduced by the
	compiler need to be documented.  The suggested place is a single
	location in the compiler/notes directory.

3. Ignore counts for breakpoints

	Zoltan suggested an improvement to the mdb breakpoint mechanism
	to allow a breakpoint to be ignored for a certain count of
	times before it is triggered.  One issue raised by this is that
	it would be easy for a user to forget that each call to a
	det/semidet procedure generates two events, so if they want
	the Nth call then the ignore count would need to be 2N.  Of
	course, for multi/nondet code the situation is far worse.

	A solution proposed by Zoltan is to allow options which specify,
	for the purposes of the ignore count, which events should be
	counted.  For example, the break command could accept the
	following options:

		-I N		ignore N interface events
		-E N		ignore N entries into procedures

4. Progress reports

	We went around the table, with each person in turn discussing
	what they had been working on recently and/or what they were
	planning to work on.

	Zoltan Somogyi (zs):
		- Fixed some bugs in the deep profiler relating to the
		  purity of inserted code.  All inserted code must be
		  labelled impure and impurity must be propagated
		  properly.

		- Has discussed with Fergus a change to stack slot
		  allocation, and has been working on implementing it.

		- Did some work on the deep profiler paper.

		- Has done some work implementing the aforementioned
		  ignore counts for breakpoints.

	Simon Taylor (stayl):
		- Worked on mmake in the compiler.

	David Overton (dmo):
		- Started work on a new paper on mode constraints.

		- Tried out the new deep profiler, for example by
		  testing it on the compiler itself.

	Mark Brown (dougl):
		- Investigated the .net profiling API, which looks more
		  useful for implementing the retry log than the debug
		  API.  Although the retry mechanism is intended to be
		  operated from within a debugger, the way the retry log
		  should be constructed has more in common with how a
		  profile is constructed than how a debugger operates.

		- Investigated the source code for portable.net.

	David Jeffery (dgj):
		- Fixing some bugs with removing unused typeclass info
		  arguments from calls into C code.

		- Fixed a bug in deconstruct.

Minutes taken by Mark Brown (dougl@cs.mu.oz.au)