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

[Kevin E Martin]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 05:42:08PM -0400, Kevin E Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2005 at 02:19:36PM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > 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.

I should clarify this statement.  I think we should definitely document
the minimum base platform requirements.  I'm just not quite sure if we
should make significant changes to them in the initial release.