Danek> Sendmail is the only thing I can think of that tracks the outside
Danek> closely, and I think that jbeck has gotten all the stuff Solaris
Danek> needs into the main distribution over the years. It might be
Danek> instructive to ask how he maintained Solaris sendmail before a
Danek> new drop was an easy thing to take in.
Back in 1997 I did the port of SMI-8.6 forward to 8.8, and renamed it
from SMI-{version} to {version}+Sun, which seemed more accurate and more
intuitive. There was a partial port for SMI-8.6 from its 8.6.10 base to
8.7.1, which was mostly complete, but then I had to update it thru the
entire 8.7 series (1 thru 6), and again for 8.8 and its series (0 thru 8).
I took this hair-ball and used `diff -u` to create a giant patch. There
were 17 Sun "hacks" at that time. Each time a new release (or Alpha or
Beta thereof) came out, I used patch (Gnu patch, sadly, as Solaris' patch
didn't grok unified diffs until Solaris 9) to re-apply it and diff (same
story as patch) to update it. Usually it applied cleanly, but major
upgrades usually had some changes which caused problems, which I had
to fix by hand, and these were generally sufficiently complex to make
my earn my paycheck. :-)
Over time, I both got tired of doing this, and thought that most of the
hacks were Bad Ideas (or, in some cases, ideas which may have made sense
at one time, but no longer), and worked to obsolete them. I killed the
worst of them in Solaris 9, and most of the last few in Solaris 10, to
where we are now down to only two, and those two will soon be part of
the sendmail.org distribution once 8.14 is released (though inside ifdef
SUN_EXTENSIONS, which is defined on line 59 of
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/sendmail/src/Makefile
though not defined by default in the sendmail.org makefiles).
Much of this was keyed off of my being a long time contributor to the
sendmail community, so they knew I wasn't just trying to force some Sun
hacks on the rest of the world. The fact that I had gotten rid of 15
of the original 17 and only asked them to take two for 8.14 also helped,
as did OpenSolaris (might as well have the same source since we're open).
Sorry for the longish answer, but since you asked... :-)
-- John
http://blogs.sun.com/jbeck
