Modularization development notes [was Re: RFA sent to the ArchWG]

[Kevin E Martin]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 02:19:36PM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Kevin E Martin wrote:
> >Ideally, we would like to see at least one person and preferably more
> >signed up to work on each of these platforms; however, it is more likely
> >that we will get fairly good coverage on a subset of them.  I expect
> >good coverage on Linux, but we need much more than that.  So, if you are
> >interested in working on a platform and have the hardware available,
> >please speak up now so that we can get an idea of where we stand. [***]
> 
> You can count me in for Solaris on SPARC & x86/x64, of course.

Thanks Alan!  A while back Jay Cotton had also expressed interest in
helping out.  I hope he's still interested too.

> >What I have in mind here is a simple brain dump of the process used to
> >autotool in the xapps, xlibs, xserver and Debrix projects.  I'd also
> >like to see us discuss any common conventions that everyone should
> >follow so that we have a consistent build system and config options name
> >space.
> 
> Me too - I'd like to see a page in the wiki for:
>  - how to do common checks
>  - lists of common things you need to check for (i.e. which functions
>    are known to need special handling).

Excellent suggestions.  I'll add them to the list.

> I'd also like to see a page definining the minimum base platform 
> requirements,
> i.e. ANSI/ISO C89-compliant compiler, etc.   Things we can all agree you 
> must
> have and we no longer need to special case.   That doesn't mean we prevent
> running on older platforms, just that people who want to build on those 
> platforms may need to do something else first - for instance, if we decide 
> it's finally time to declare snprintf a minimum base requirement, older OS
> users would have to build a libsnprintf first and set the flags to link with
> it on those systems.

The one area that concerns me is that we're sharing souce code in the
initial monolithic and modular releases, so changing the sources to add
new minimum platform requirements will affect both.  It would be good to
keep the 6.9 monolithic release buildable on older platforms.  I'd
definitely like to see this in the modular tree eventually, but I'll
have to give it some more thought for the initial release.

Thanks,
Kevin