Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 23:34:17 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: The whole "compat dist" saga... Message-ID: <23101.844151657@time.cdrom.com>
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Most of you are already familiar with the compat* distributions that have been a part of FreeBSD since 2.0. They've generally helped people, though they've also occasionally hosed them, so I've kept providing them despite it being a pain the butt to do so. It's been a pain in the butt primarily because we've never automated the process - it's all done by hand and more than a little failure-prone. Ideally, we'd like a registry someplace of all the libraries we've bumped in the current release cycle so that I could do something like: 21_compat: cvs co -P -rRELENG_2_1_0_RELEASE lib && \ if [ -f lib/updatelist ]; then \ for i in `cat lib/updatelist`; do \ (cd $$i ; make all install DESTDIR=$R/compat21) \ done; \ tar -czf $R/dists/compat21.tgz -C $R/compat21 . ; \ fi To build a 2.1 compatibility distribution. This target could be cloned for compat20 and compat215 as well, of course. However, that's only one type of compatibility library. Don't most of you folks think that while selecting "compatibility distributions" in the FreeBSD installation, you should be able to check off Linux or SCO compatibility as well? From the end-user's perspective, it'd seem far preferable to be able to check off a box and have Linux executables Just Work afterwards. If we want to tackle the whole compat distribution question separately from this then that's also fine by me, but I think we should address them both in deciding how serious we really are about making backwards and cross-OS compatibility easier to use than it is now. Jordan
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