EFS should have been called NOS, for "Network Operating System", because that's really a better description of what it is. Then people would just confuse us with an energy drink....
We're also finding ourselves doing the same thing a lot of the Linux distributions do: patching, and maintaining the patches, for various products in order to get them to install into our "NOS". Over the past several years, I've found an increasing number of cases where the official public release of source code of a given OSS product will NOT build cleanly on a given OS, and the solution is found in a patch which is bundled with the distribution's own packaging mechanism, but NOT rolled back into the canonical, public release of the product. Preliminary results of my current investigation show this to be the case for File::LibMagic on Debian. You can NOT build the latest release (0.96) downloaded from CPAN. It either fails to find the magic.h header file, or if you help it (which requires installing by hand, not via cpanp) then it simply fails to compile (I have all the gory details, if anyone cares). The solution appears to exist, but local to the debian source distributions. For example, a similar problem was reported in the Debian community, and fixed in the Debian source distributions: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=577288 But there's NOTHING about this bug in the CPAN RT for that module. This creates a really obnoxious problem for us. I would like to use File::LibMagic in efs-core and efs-deploy, but it will introduce a manual step to the bootstrap process. On Debian (and presumably Ubuntu, too) the module doesn't even build at all, so we have some patching of our own to do (or find -- this particular bug may have been fixed but I haven't found it yet). For now, I'm going to leave everything broken on Debian, Ubuntu and FreeBSD, until someone other than me cares about running EFS on those platforms, and then they can step up to the plate and give me some help. It has annoyed me for over 10 years that each Linux distribution is, in practice, a collection of FORKS of many of the products they are built with. Red Hat was really bad about this for years, and wasn't getting their patches included in the official source releases, but I think every distribution does this now. This makes it very, very hard for us to build what amounts to yet another operating system distribution (hence my suggestion that EFS is really a NOS).
_______________________________________________ EFS-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.openefs.org/mailman/listinfo/efs-dev
