Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 07:41:51 -0600 From: D J Hawkey Jr <hawkeyd@visi.com> To: Michael Lucas <mwlucas@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tangent for discussion: FreeBSD performs worse that Linux Message-ID: <20011210074151.A29219@sheol.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <20011209172652.A25745@blackhelicopters.org>; from mwlucas@FreeBSD.ORG on Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 05:26:52PM -0500 References: <20011209100855.A22942@sheol.localdomain> <20011209084620.V14858-100000@coredump.scriptkiddie.org> <20011209111523.A23357@sheol.localdomain> <20011209175137.B13554@clan.nothing-going-on.org> <20011209121703.A23726@sheol.localdomain> <20011209172652.A25745@blackhelicopters.org>
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[this is a re-post; apparently my first didn't take?]
On Dec 09, at 05:26 PM, Michael Lucas wrote:
>
> On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 12:17:03PM -0600, D J Hawkey Jr wrote:
> > So far, I've made three patchfiles that can be applied to 4.2REL and 4.3REL.
> > Not exactly the repertoire one would need to garner interest and momentum.
>
> Everything starts somewhere. When I wrote my first FreeBSD article a
> few years ago, I had no idea where it would lead. Keep it up, and the
> Project might well ask you to make it an official FreeBSD resource.
>
> If you start now, in a few months you'll have patchsets for 4.2-R,
> 4.3-R, 4.4-R, and 4.5-R. That looks like a pretty serious investment
> of time and/or dedication to me.
Yup. To me, too. But as I said, without some sort of barometer I can read
that tells me what's going on with -STABLE or -CURRENT that is even half-
way portable and worthwhile to previous releases, I'm afraid it'd be a
rather stale resource pretty quickly.
Ideally, it would be grand if the hackers/committers could mail me the
patches they commit to -STABLE, and I could then backport them to previous
releases, where possible. But, I could easily see this overwhelming me
in very short order!
Just so I'm not read as someone "on the fence", I am prepared to make
public the patches I've made (as well as those from others), but there
are considerable hurdles to be worked out:
- They would be patches against whatever is in place on a machine
at a particluar time. If it was something-REL, they might not
apply cleanly to something-STABLE or something-HACKED. At a bare
minimum, this implies that the user/admin be well-acquainted with
the syntax of unified diffs, and the basics of "code discovery".
- After such patches are applied, how does one guard against a
subsequent 'cvsup' blowing away these "private" updates. That is,
someone applies my patch for ICH sound to their 4.3REL base. How
can that source be "protected" against a 'cvsup RELENG_4_3'
upgrade, which will overwrite those patched files?
These two points alone might (should?) scare off all but the most anal
of SysAdmins. If such a resource was available (patches site), it seems
to me the target audience would be quite small, indeed. One of the things
I'm really asking (without explicitely stating so) is, "How can such a
site, more specifically, it's content, be made sufficiently painless
to install?"
I can backport to 4.2REL and 4.3REL (I have these releases), but I
don't have the resources (read: "free partitions") to accomodate 4.1
or 4.4.
> It's cliche, but: ten thousand lines of code begins with the first
> #define. (Hmmmm.... click click click... okay, style(9) says it
> should be the first #include. But you get the idea.)
Actually, the first part of a source module should be The Abstract. :-)
> Michael Lucas
Dave
--
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