About 25 years ago (dear god that makes me feel old) when CVS was the new and happening thing in version control systems, we were in the really bad problem area at Human Computing Resources of porting unix to more than 1000, kid you not, of different M68010, M68020, NS16032, NS32032, Zilog-I-forget, MIPS, and I forget what other hardware-based systems, with completely crazy combination of graphical cards, interrupt driven weird hardware and well, trust me, it was a mess.
We wanted one kernel that we could deploy everywhere. This was impossible, but we got the best we could do, given our constraints by changing the whole build system to one in which you typed 'make' and it started by copying all the files from our home repository system to a complete and brand new file system, and then copying all the tests to the same system, and then running the tests that ran before you tried to compile a kernel, (mostly having to do with seeing that your hardware was sane and that the setup script worked, and was happy with the results) and then you made your kernel. Which could take more than an hour. And then you ran your kernel tests against the new kernel (which happened overnight). In the morning we had a whole new set of errors to deal with. I don't think that we have reached this level of complexity with PyPy yet, but it is something to think about. The time of 'everything is a i386' is over now, and it is not clear how this will play out in the realm of systems and even application programming languages. Clearly not as badly as we had it when we were making kernels as quickly as we were being sent hardware, but there still is some effect. Laura _______________________________________________ pypy-dev mailing list pypy-dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pypy-dev
