On Sun, 2007-02-18 at 21:04 +0000, Peter Tribble wrote:
> On 2/5/07, Laszlo (Laca) Peter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> > Another library from the GNOME community is libxml2, which is
> > now used all over Solaris. I'm currently working on updating
> > it in Solaris 10 to a version that is 2 years newer. The diff
> > is 100000+ lines (not counting the Makefile changes) and yet,
> > no ABI breakage was encountered.
>
> Just as a matter of interest, is it easier to do regular updates
> where the changes might be small, or wait a while and do one
> big change that has larger impact?
Unfortunately, it isn't. While, it would be easy enough to update
most OSS modules as a newer version becomes available[1], libxml2
is a special animal because it's used by so fundamental parts of
Solaris:
- SMF
- Zones
- JDS (GNOME and APOC)
- FMA
- libpool
- SDS metassist
- SunCluster
- Live Upgrade
In each update, we need to verify that none of these breaks.
During the latest update, I finished most of the engineering work
up to the point of building test packages in less than a week[2],
then each of the above teams had to test them. It took
more than a month to get all the test results back (we all
have different schedules and priorities). And one of the above
products actually had a crash caused by the update. The problem
was not in libxml2 but in their code and was fixed just in time to
make it into the final build of that product that will be
released before the next Solaris 10 update.[3]
And that's just the work before the changes can be put back.
So it's a lot of work for quite a few people. I certainly
wouldn't like to do it more often.
> I know that I (as someone who ends up building my own copies
> of things like this because the Solaris version is old and other
> software tends to want recent versions) would prefer more frequent
> updates.
Which ones? (Apart from libxml2...)
Filing bugs is a good idea, at least we can see that there is
a need for an update.
Laca
[1] creating Solaris patches is painful, though, but at least
updating Nevada is easy
[2] if libxml2 was in the JDS consolidation it would have taken
me about 10 minutes (; See my notes in this thread:
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/sfwnv-discuss/2006-June/000042.html
[3] If we had failed to make that build, we simply couldn't
have updated libxml2 in s10 this year.
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