Dear Gap-Forum,
I have had the idea described below, in relation with the
impending retirement of prof. Neubuser, and the expected
distribution of GAP developement over various sites when
this will occur.

There are presently only very few people outside of Aachen
who know enough about the internals of GAP to be able to make
improvements to the kernel or even just debug it. On the other
hand, there are quite a few people who are interested in GAP
development, have been involved in the development of packages
in the GAP language, and would be interested in participating
in future development of the kernel (e.g. myself). The problem
is the steep learning curve due to the lack of documentation
and/or teaching material about the C sources of the kernel.
It is to be hoped that such documentation will be written
before GAP development leaves Aachen (probably a lot
of work in perspective for the main developper, M.Schoenert).
In the meanwhile, I thought it would be a good thing if it was
possible to organize in Aachen sometime something like a
one-week workshop on GAP internals, where interested people
could come and have a good start at learning how to hack
(properly) the kernel.

I talked briefly about this with prof. Neubuser during the DAG
day in Amiens, and he also thought it a good idea, and that
possibly next spring could be a good time for such a workshop.

What do other people think of this?

Jean MICHEL