When DJA left Birmingham University much of the knowledge on the workings of ADI went with him. The overall status of ADI at that time was one of only partial completeness, and thus the author spent many months of programming effort to obtain a working system.
This work was primarily in the outer layers of ADI, those that deal with the file dependent data I/O, and more specifically with the handling of Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) data files.
The part of ADI which handles the internal data storage and method handling was (thankfully) fully functional and required little alteration (apart from minor changes for a Linux port). This was fortuitous, as the large section of code with forms these routines is written in C, in a complex and largely undocumented manner. Whilst very competently coded indeed, it is felt that such a scheme is unsupportable within the ASTERIX system, and should for any reason this library cease to function correctly it would be difficult to maintain.
Thus, whilst everything functions correctly as the moment it is deemed necessary to anticipate any future problems by designing a new library to replace ADI.