While in most cases I don't see the point of someone not part of the support process recompiling anything that's part of a supported distribution (because if you fool with it yourself outside of supported mechanisms such as upgrades, patches, or supported configuration options, the result becomes effectively impossible to support), I could certainly see the point of (if source is available anyway) having sufficient information to know just what versions of each source file (and if it's open, to be able to retrieve it) correspond not only to a particular release FCS, but to the installed updates, patches, etc. That is, for Solaris, ideally one could have some tool that determined for any given object part of a distribution package (perhaps as modified by patches, etc), the corresponding source file(s) version, and optionally retrieved all that were openly available. That way, if someone is trying to troubleshoot a problem that involves interaction between their own code and distribution-supplied code, they not only have great tools like dtrace, they also have as much as possible of the source for what they're running.
Of course, if all interfaces were well designed, fully and unambiguously specified, and everyone always followed the specifications strictly, then it should usually be clear whether a bug was in customer code or in the distribution. But that's a lot of "ifs" that don't seem to survive the real world, even with the best of intentions. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
