On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 04:44:59PM +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> 
> We have an internal meeting every few weeks  called "dist meeting"
> that discusses major technical changes in our distribution.  
> 
> Since it's not possible for most of you to attend it, I'd like to try
> an experiment and share the agenda before the meeting - and the
> meeting minutes afterwards with you.  I'm asking for your feedback on
> the agenda and any comments that you have and will bring those
> comments into the meeting and raise the points you've made.  Will this
> work?

We'll see... ;-)

> The planned topics for tomorrow's meeting are:
> 
> * D-Bus 0.91 and PolicyKit/resmgr
> 
>   We just switched to D-Bus 0.91 and the question arises whether to
>   continue to use resmgr or switch to PolicyKit.

Not envolved enough to have a personal opinion about that.

> * Move to GNOME 2.16
> 
>   The packagers have started already with the first packages, we want
>   to discuss the timeframe for the move and the move of GNOME to /usr
>   (from /opt/gnome).

I personally like to see as much as possible as soon as possible moved from
/opt away into /usr.  But since I am not aware of the GNOME specific
compatibility problems that arise from that I could not say anything more
specific about the GNOME switch.

> * SuSEconfig removal
> 
>   SuSEconfig is currently run after each package installation by YaST
>   and is a huge bottleneck.  Some scripts have already been removed
>   and we have to discuss how to move on.

Very much appreciated.  If you see a specific script problematic to remove you
don't have an appropriate solution for you might want to post it here, maybe
someone else could provide a solution for this.

> * update messages general/conditional (e.g. bind)
> 
>   During update of packages they could notify users about changes via
>   email and/or the SuSEplugger (until 10.0, this is not anymore in
>   10.1).  Most of these are outdated and not really usefull anymore
>   and should be removed.  The question is how to handle situations
>   like bind where config files get rewritten and the user should be
>   informed if this fails.

I personally liked the mail variant.

> * Dropping UP Kernel on i386/x86-64
> 
>   The proposal by the kernel team is to use only SMP kernels and no UP
>   kernel.  It's already this way on Xen - there is no Xen UP kernel.
> 
>   Advantages:
>   One less kernel rpm. On 64bit there will be only two kernel rpms then,
>   kernel-default and kernel-xen; and with some luck if paravirt ops
>   works out as designed we can then later drop kernel-xen too and
>   only ship a single 64bit kernel. 32bit could go down to two.
>   Less QA. 
>   Less space on ftp servers.
>   Less build time.
> 
>   Avoids a lot of problems with install kernel being different from
>   final kernel. The i386 UP kernel e.g. doesn't support advanced APIC
>   modes, which broke i386 installation of SLES10 on some
>   systems. We've had quite a lot of bugs in this area over the years.
> 
>   Disadvantages:
> 
>   Will be slightly slower and bigger on UP systems. Most of the

Do you have numbers for that?

>   performance difference is fixed up by kraxel's LOCK prefix runtime
>   patch. Memory usage will be up a bit on UP systems We would lose a

Do you have numbers including the patch?

>   few drivers which are BROKEN_ON_SMP.  Usually these are long
>   unmaintained drivers which are broken for other reasons anyways so
>   it's not a big loss.  Also we never had them in the SMP kernel and
>   most modern systems run SMP kernels.  There might be other bugs

I suppose the most "famous" drivers with these problems are some of the
binary-only drivers anyway.

>   caused by this, but Fedora has done this before us and they didn't
>   seem to have regretted it so far.

If the numbers don't show a difference that is too hard then I'd definitely
like to see that.

> * Linker Options and Optimizations
> 
>   We plan to use the recently developed linker optimizations for the
>   GNU hashstyle and use the readonly relocations:
> 
>   LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--hash-style=both"
>   (http://lwn.net/Articles/192082/ )

I think this is a very good idea because especially for large C++ applications
I can often see the linker consuming _extremely_ much CPU time resolving hash
conflicts, especially when templates are used in an extensive way.

>   LDFLAGS="-Wl,-z relro"
>   (see http://people.redhat.com/drepper/nonselsec.pdf)

I currently can't see a disadvantage of using this one thus unless someone
could actually see one I'd go the same way.

Robert

-- 
Robert Schiele                  Tel.: +49-621-181-2214
Dipl.-Wirtsch.informatiker      mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]

"Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur."

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