On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 07:22:41AM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > In my opinion, if a library is required to build ON, then it should > probably be moved into ON. > > This might mean that libxml should be moved.
Yes, and most people I've talked with about this have agreed. There have been at various times efforts to do this but it hasn't happened. I also think Net-SNMP (really SMA) should live in ON for similar reasons; after all, SEA has lived there for years and provides the same type of core functionality. > If it were moved, then the autoconf code could be removed and replaced > with hardcoded Makefiles. It probably wouldn't be too hard. This is > the way the BSDs have been doing thing things for years now. :-) > (Except they call "on" either "base" or "core" and the other bits go > into "pkgsrc" or "ports".) Yes, and this is the approach I'd like to see us take for all "strategic" externally-sourced components and as many of the nonstrategic ones as we can find people willing to do the work. Unfortunately it's expensive and does not deliver immediate and obvious benefits to Sun's paying customers, so convincing people at Sun that it's worth doing has been a challenge to say the least. It does, however, deliver a notable improvement in product quality and in some ways makes engineering easier, so perhaps OpenSolaris will make it possible in spite of Sun's priorities. For this to work, we need to get away from the idea that everything has to be updated continuously. It doesn't. What's needed is the ability to bring in needed pieces of functionality at the right time, which requires a full understanding of both the existing and new code. A model that emphasises frequent, inexpensive updates and staying close to the upstream source - which likely relies on autoconf and has other undesirable artifacts, no matter how involved we may be in its development community - is incompatible with this requirement. That is, instead of offering "libxml 5.6.6" as a feature of an OpenSolaris-based distribution, we would shift to offering "an XML parsing library with (X,Y,Z) interfaces, the subset (X,Y) of which are compatible with those found in libxml 5.6.6." But even if you think we should never fork the actual implementation of an externally-sourced component, there's not a lot of incentive to keep using their miserably broken build subsystems. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
