Date: Thu, 23 May 1996 22:32:55 +0800 From: Peter Wemm <peter@spinner.DIALix.COM> To: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.tfs.com> Cc: "Gary Palmer" <gpalmer@FreeBSD.ORG>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, peter@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: src/gnu Message-ID: <199605231432.WAA03506@spinner.DIALix.COM> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 22 May 1996 20:00:34 GMT." <779.832795234@critter.tfs.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>> Comments? What does our current cvs meister thing? >> >> (The reason behind the move is the fact that the import wasn't done >> properly in the first place, and if I remember, the tools were just >> brought over wholesale from the 1.x source tree rather than being >> seperately imported so that they could be mainained). > >Isn't the fundamental problem that nobody maintains them, rather than >how they're maintained ? Yes, that is more the problem IMHO. I dont think we have a lot of spare time/energy to sink into re-porting stuff to a new tree.. However, if we came up with a workable plan, we could import new stuff that way. Rod and I did a bit of work on a strategy for this before, I think it can still work, even though it's a bit of a pain to set up the first time. The other main problem is that CVS is really quite limited in it's vendor branch area when faced with a vendor source that moves/renames/etc a fair bit. This would not be a problem if we used something like P3 which handles renames while hardly raising an eyebrow (ie: you "import" the code in it's natural file layout and adapt the "view" of it so that it appears in a 4.4-style bmake'able tree.) (and before anybody asks "What's P3?", see http://www.p3.com/ and note the special (and extremely generous) FreeBSD arrangement) >Apart from that, wouldn't it make more sense to use the "ports" paradigm >on them instead of checking in all the files ? In theory we should be >running pretty much footool-9.3.tar.gz with a few patches, so why not >speed up our CVS-tree by actually not checking in the thousands of files >but rather access them by reference via the tar file ? That might be OK, but there's a few gotchas: 1: The sup users would be getting multi-megabyte files in a single lump 2: The files would have to be extracted, patched and then compiled as part of the build process... That'd add a fair bit of overhead to the disk space requirements (ie: gcc would start at a 20MB or so .tar file, then we'd extract 20MB of files out of it and compile half of them.) >That would also make it easier to show that we do the "GPL" thing... I am not too concerned with that really, as we pretty much comply with the intent of the requirements.. We are only obligated to offer the sources somehow, which includes over the internet (which we do), and the changes we make are also visible on the internet (Thanks to the CvsWeb interface that somebody (who's name escapes me) wrote) that allows access to the logs and histories etc. It just so happens that we also include a copy of the source on the CD's as well, and the files that we have modified are maked with the time it was modified (ie: the $Id$ line. The GPL does not require is to keep a history of changes in the file, nor a description of the change, just the time of the last change in our hands. IMHO, that's completely stupid as it's the most useless requirement, and especially since the majority of the GPL'ed stuff these days has ChangeLog files which do not comply with the letter of the GPL conditions). I'd better stop now before I start really ranting about the GPL. For a system that's meant to encourage "freedom of programming", all it's done is bitterly divide the non-commercial programming world into two groups, neither of which can freely use the other's source code.. So, the end result is that the non-commercial world has to reinvent each other's work which is an utter shame and only helps the proprietary companies get further ahead. >-- >Poul-Henning Kamp | phk@FreeBSD.ORG FreeBSD Core-team. >http://www.freebsd.org/~phk | phk@login.dknet.dk Private mailbox. >whois: [PHK] | phk@ref.tfs.com TRW Financial Systems, Inc >. >Future will arrive by its own means, progress not so. Cheers, -Peter
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199605231432.WAA03506>