Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 20:30:53 -0500 (EST) From: Tom Huppi <thuppi@huppi.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: what are patches ? Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.58.0502041958160.74497@nuumen.pair.com> In-Reply-To: <ef60af0905020416362733ef5d@mail.gmail.com> References: <ef60af0905020416242ee9cac3@mail.gmail.com> <42041327.7020107@makeworld.com> <ef60af0905020416362733ef5d@mail.gmail.com>
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On Sat, 5 Feb 2005, Gert Cuykens wrote: > On Fri, 04 Feb 2005 18:28:23 -0600, Chris <racerx@makeworld.com> wrote: > > Gert Cuykens wrote: > > > They are all located under files right ? But what are they and what do they do ? > > > > Patch what's not correct. > > > > Then there are alot of things broken in the ports if you ask me :) I > bet there are more patches then source files :) Almost totally unrelated, but this reminds me of a very pleasant conversation I had with on of the early FreeBSD developers. He mentioned that the FreeBSD project grew out of what was known as 'the unofficial 386BSD patch kit' or something like that name. He said that it got to the point where the patch set was indeed larger than the distribution of the OS of interest (which was, I believe, the first port of BSD Unix to the x86 architecture.) I didn't get the sense that he was joking about that. > Why does freebsd require so many patches ? cant the compiler figure it > out what needs to be done ? Rather than the compiler, that task would be mainly up to the configure system and most software distributions have one. Usually the configure system is Autoconf based these days (for a good reason, imho.) One of the troubles I see is that all too often, project developers kinda forget the whole point of using the system in the first place and end up back where they started from...pretty one-platform centric, and more often than not Linux is the platform. (Seems to me that this problem even seems to exist within the Linux community to the extent that there are so many unique distributions!) Also, of course, the ability to even test on multi-platforms is outside of the reasonable ability and interest of the folks driving one project or another, and some of them have limited experience on multiple platforms as well. Patches are, in my opinion, a decent way to overcome the problems and are as well implemented within the ports framework as I've seen anywhere (which actually isn't saying all that much :) Thanks, - Tom
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