[OSUNIX-dev] Build progress + Vote on project direction

["C. Bergström"]

Hi everyone!

With some tinkering of the build system I've taken the onnv-gate build 
process and almost seamlessly wrapped it in a modular way.  The proof 
was when the kernel built and everything installed successfully last night.

I was somewhat surprised that you must use gas from binutils 2.15.  I 
was overriding aw by explicitly setting it and patching as I hit 
incompatibilities, but I'm not sure the  amount of work needed was worth 
the gain.

-----------
Here's where things get tricky..

There's two options
    1) Use my overridden and experimental amd64 only build process and 
fix the regressions (2 major ones I know of currently)
    2) Build a multilib setup just as Sun currently does it, revert all 
my amd64 stuff and more slowly integrate it

With the binary packages rolling I'm looking forward to spinning an iso 
before FOSDEM, but not sure what others will find most useful..?

With option #2 I can make a script to remove my changes and possible 
spin an iso in the next week.  Without additional help the pure amd64 
environment could be 1-2 weeks or more before it even minimally boots 
and works correctly.

Both options still have the following benefits (or disadvantages 
depending how you look at it)

   a) onnv-gate is packaged in a very fine grained way
   b) under new ospkg building and packaging framework
   c) We could have a continuous build server to test any bad commits 
from Sun
   d) We could more easily test the CR's dropped
   e) We're completely free of SVR4
   f) The difference between snv_10x and svn_10y will be trivial to roll 
updates.
   g) We'll have a place to apply patches which upstream won't accept 
w/o an SCA (eg  interface enhancements from Jörg, Moinak, myself and all 
the other devs)
   h) We can test new compilers/toolchains/optimizations very easily and 
adjust where we are forced to
   i) We can start our own community QA work
   j) For any distro who uses our packaging we can all work together on 
bug fixes, new drivers etc..
   k) Anyone who wants to work on the fully open libc will be able to 
easily pull a full working dev environment

-------------
Here's the catch
   b) we still need xorg built (at least the headers) so that I can 
build icedtea6
   c) binary package support isn't complete, but from source does work 
great though
   d) java is and will remain broken until icedtea6 is built which is 
after xorg

Some people have offered to help on all this, but so far it's only minor 
or I'm blocking things by not giving enough details I think..  I've 
tried to file bug reports/RFE at bugs.osunix.org and updating the TODO 
list(s) on www.osunix.org, but we need more help from the community and 
coordination from those actually doing work to avoid duplication.

So.. What do you want. Options 1) or 2)?

Thanks

./Chrisotpher

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