Date: Tue, 17 Sep 1996 16:01:55 -0600 From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> To: graphix@iastate.edu Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: OpenBSD <-> FreeBSD Message-ID: <199609172201.QAA12496@rover.village.org> In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 11 Sep 1996 19:51:02 CDT
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: Is there anyone tracking the changes that are made to the 4.4 source : in NetBSD/OpenBSD and incorporating the changes into the FreeBSD tree on : a regular basis? If not, what is the common feeling of if this would be Having looked into this problem before I upgraded the size of my disk drive collection.... The kernel sources generally would be hard to do. There are some parts of the kernel that would be easy to do this for, and other parts that would be hard (the vm system comes to mind for the latter). This would be complex and would require more effort than it currently is worth to make it happen. Better to tilt at smaller windmills :-). A smaller windmill might be userland. It should be basically trivial, but it likely isn't at this point. It is a *LOT* of work. There are hacks on all three *BSD systems that need to be reconciled with the 4.4 Lite-2 changes and eachother. OpenBSD, for example, has gone "paranoid" in the use of sprintf due to potential buffer overflow security holes. These would be great to merge into FreeBSD, for example. I know that OpenBSD merges a lot of FreeBSD stuff into it (the ports system, for example) and it would be good to narrow the gap between the *BSDs. A good first step would be to merge in as much of the differences in the user level code as possible. This would take someone a lot of time, and then be a bear to keep in sync between the three. OpenBSD keeps in sync with NetBSD by a brute force approach that involves running diffs, lots of patches and the watchful eyes of the core team. Its a lot of work for them (judging from the timestamps of various messages and such). However, let us say that FreeBSD merges every last change from NetBSD and OpenBSD into its tree. I would maintain that this would be a wasted effort because NetBSD and OpenBSD might not pick them up and we'd still have version skew. Maybe what would work best would be for people in each of the commiter groups to work towards ironing out the differences one at a time. Take /usr/src/bin or something small and make all of those files the same (or as close to it as is sane) and slowly integrated the changes from the other trees. Once there is convergence, then it would be easier to keep things in sync. Once there is a large part of the world that is nearly identical on all the platforms, then it might not be a bad idea to talk of having a Grand Unified Source Tree (GUST, you heard it hear first :-). Until then, I think it will remain a project too large to ever make good headway. In conclusion: Merging from other sources is a good idea. Trying to make all three share parts of their source tree is an idea whose time has not yet arrived. Warner
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