On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 07:29:06PM +0100, Darren Reed wrote: > The open source communities are quite busy reinventing all > the problems of the 90s and tiny Unices all by themselves with > all the tiny Linuxes, etc. Maybe that's something *you* don't
Yes, they are. Since they're the ones making that mistake, they should be the ones to pay the associated taxes. Not us. > see but I do. Go have a look in the source code for IPFilter if > you want to see what it means to maintain code that works > cross-platform without requiring the "configure" solution > (and not the code you find in (Open)Solaris, the original code.) That's exactly the point. There are different levels of portability; the ones that matter most are foundational: avoiding CPU-specific and endian-specific constructs. But if $VENDOR wants some useful piece of open source code to work cleanly and correctly on their fork of Unix, they should pay someone to make that happen, no? As a practical matter, most of the software in OpenSolaris does, and should, leverage other OpenSolaris-specific libraries that aren't going to exist elsewhere anyway. Some of these in turn leverage kernel functionality. That's what an integrated operating environment is, and that itself has great value to users. Porting functionality from an integrated environment to a disjoint one is inherently challenging, and quite honestly the build environment is the least of it. > So that we can take a standard or new idea that we want to see > tried/tested/used elsewhere and allow others to build on top of > that rather than to (re)invent their own wheel. I don't really care what wheels others reinvent. OpenSolaris is open source; they're welcome to take our stuff and port it themselves. If they want the benefits of the features in that codebase and aren't willing to port it, they're welcome to simply use it as-is. > So that we can contribute to the greater open source community > in the same way that it contributes to us. Some kind of masochistic circle-jerk, then? They give us a bunch of shoddily-written build tools and "portability theatre," so we should return the "favour?" I'd rather build software that works. > We do want this to be a two way relationship, don't we? Speaking only for myself, I don't really care. All the important and innovative work, the value if you will, should be in the source itself, and that's open for all. Making autotools-based software build and work correctly on any platform other than the exact one the developer(s) used in the first place itself requires a great deal of effort already. I don't see any reason it's somehow less friendly to other communities to ask them to do a similar amount of (easier and more debuggable) work if they want to port it to some other platform. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" FishWorks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
