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Date:      Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:20:40 +1100 (EST)
From:      John Birrell  <jb@cimlogic.com.au>
To:        bright@hotjobs.com (Alfred Perlstein)
Cc:        freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: [Ultra] Compiler, again
Message-ID:  <199811280420.PAA24344@cimlogic.com.au>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9811272232330.1605-100000@bright.fx.genx.net> from Alfred Perlstein at "Nov 27, 98 10:37:38 pm"

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Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> This means that freebsd-sparc will be a version freeze as of a few days
> from now if i can get this server up.  Hopefully if anything comes of this
> a merge back into -current won't be too painful.

Keeping the code out of the tree will definitely mean a painful merge.
I say this speaking from experience. I found it better to make commits
on-the-run in order to prevent them suffering from bit rot. A month
in the life of a project like FreeBSD is a long time. Don't be fooled
by the ease with which you can catch up on i386 by doing a CVSup and
a make world. When you are working on a different architecture, any
changes to the i386 tree can blow you out of the water.

You need to remember that code that is submitted needs to be reviewed.
The greater the number of lines of diffs in submitted code, the more
difficult it is for people to review it. Sometimes what seems to be
a simple diff to a single source file will generate many emails from
people saying "don't do that". Leaving all this for a single merge
will probably doom the port.

I think people need to be realistic about what it is possible to achieve
and what steps are required. It would make sense to concentrate on
helping to make FreeBSD's build process support cross-compilation, starting
with i386. There are other people working on support for other architectures
that will support that. "One step at a time", not "lets write code
and test, test, test!".

-- 
John Birrell - jb@cimlogic.com.au; jb@freebsd.org http://www.cimlogic.com.au/
CIMlogic Pty Ltd, GPO Box 117A, Melbourne Vic 3001, Australia +61 418 353 137

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