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To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: The whole "compat dist" saga...
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 1996 23:34:17 -0700
Message-ID: <23101.844151657@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

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