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Date:      Tue, 03 Sep 1996 16:36:38 -0700
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
To:        Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Cc:        rkw@dataplex.net, current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Latest Current build failure 
Message-ID:  <10860.841793798@time.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 03 Sep 1996 12:02:35 PDT." <199609031902.MAA04818@phaeton.artisoft.com> 

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> There are writer locks which you are not permitted to release until
> a full build succeeds.  But of course, that's shot down each time it
> is brought up.

Because it's essentially meaningless.  A full build succeeds *where*,
Terry?  On the engineer's personal box?  I can't count the number of
build errors I've seen corrected with a sheepish "sorry guys, it
worked on *my* box!" follow-up commit.  Since engineers will always
mess with their own boxes and the source tree still has far too many
external dependencies to consider this a reasonable risk (down,
Richard! :-), the distributed model can't work yet.  That leaves one
with the idea of doing it on a "build server" which is kept
ideologically and morally pure, an increasingly hypothetical machine
we're talking about here since it'd have to be fast enough to not
become a choke-point and administered well enough that developers had
various mechanisms available for "signing up" for the next build if
one was already in progress.  Not freefall, that's for sure.

Anyway, the real answer is to fix the source tree and everyone here
knows it.  If one could build /usr/src completely "stand-alone"
starting with a small reference-set of bootstrap binaries, and where
these should come from or how they should be generated is a matter on
which I'd welcome some debate, then a developer *could* check in
changes after a certain degree of local testing and be far more
assured that they'll work for everyone else.

					Jordan



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