I'm wondering, what thought has anyone seriously given to the notion of
"shrinking" ON?
It seems like anytime anyone has anything to putback that doesn't fall
into SFW, JDS, or X11, they stick it into ON.
This might not be such a terrible idea, except that ON has gotten
really, really big. I have *got* to believe that the amount of time
wasted by engineers waiting for simple things like bringover, putback,
and file copies is significant, particularly taken cumulatively.
And, it seems like a *lot* of ON doesn't have any natural reason to be
in ON, other than historical reason, or lack of any better place to put
it. For example, the recent filebench integration. Or perl 5.6.1. Or
sendmail. Or pretty much the entire printing subsystem. Or even the
libucb compatibility stuff. I'm sure there's a lot more that could
easily be pared down.
My point is, maybe we should consider a separate consolidation,
"utility" or somesuch, for portions of ON that are not actually required
to build or boot ON. I'd hazard a guess that this would help out most
folks who work in ON a great deal -- regardless of whether their project
was in ON or the new consolidation. (I mean come on, do the folks
working on "vi" really need or a want a copy of the entire kernel and
all the drivers? Or even a copy of libc?)
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that X11 or JDS or SFW have similar
concerns. Unbounded growth of consolidations is probably painful
everywhere. Granted, someday hopefully we'll get better tools (hg), but
even then, you have to populate an initial tree to start working, so a
smaller consolidation is still beneficial.
-- Garrett
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