Hey, Keith M Wesolowski wrote: > And here's where we really come to the crux of the philosophical > differences between JDS and the rest of the Solaris organisation, > especially but not only ON. The procedure you're describing is one > which asserts that "upstream is assumed to be correct" and if in > doubt, the effects of using the autotools-based build system are > assumed to be desirable. That's perfect for compiling what the GPL so > eloquently terms "mere aggregations" of software, but it's dead wrong > for building a tightly integrated polished product.
I don't think the JDS team automatically assumes that upstream is correct. We do still thoroughly review what's going into each of the packages, and have obviously built up an experience in at least packaging the GNOME side of things within the team - giving us a pretty good idea of what things to look out for. That review might not be as formal as we would like, and more a reflection of our current resourcing. > As a concrete point, why should the default be to include all new > files built by a component's makefiles? Shouldn't we at least know > what we're shipping to customers? And if we know what we're shipping, > is it so much to ask that we explicitly specify it (in packaging > files, if not in install-sfw or equivalent) so that upon future > updates engineers are reminded that this is *their* product, and they > are expected to know what *they* are shipping to customers (to say > nothing of noticing the changes and perhaps making necessary changes > elsewhere in the system and/or alerting customers to them)? Why > should change be so cavalier? It's bad enough that huge portions of > Solaris - a Sun product, with the Sun brand affixed to it - go out the > door without anyone except (possibly) the authors having read the > code, but to dispense with even the rudiments of change control in the > name of expediency is unconscionable. While this is all very good in principle, the truth is that we're shipping a lot of software that we haven't fully reviewed and that applies both to JDS *and* to SFW/CCD. How many people in either the CCD or SFW teams have a really firm knowledge of the component they package enough to make those guarantees to the customer? Yes, I totally encourage the need to build up a per-component packaging expertise as you mention elsewhere - but we're always going to be over the proverbial barrel with the need to get this out the door as soon as possible and that urgency is something that we can't really seem to avoid these days. Glynn
