Re: Do we want to split release.9 into MD parts now or not?

On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 11:29:41PM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> Nope.  I just use the facts.  And since "small group" of
> two of us cannot agree, we need a broader attention.  I
> really hate these "closed" discussions in this open source
> project.

I would think the RE's would be a good place to start getting a list of
requirements to meet...
 

> > > A bandaid for Alpha kern.flp being low on space (kgzip(1)
> > > support would fix that).
> >  
> > You seem to be the only one strongly arguing for boot floppies on Alpha,
> > and you don't even own one [yet].
> > 
> While I don't own one, I have root accounts on two of these
> machines, one in Ukraine, and one in Netherlands.  I don't
> see how this applies here though.  

No, it says you've never done the actual installation on an Alpha and may
not be up on all the ways that people do it.  Typical Alpha users (if
they have any kind of OSF/1,Digital Unix,Tru64 back ground) don't expect
that Unix can be installed on an Alpha starting with floppies.

Sun also has never (other than the i386) supported starting an install
from floppies.  So Sparc64 users are also acomstomed to and expect to
either netboot, cdboot, or dd'ing an image onto a SCSI disk; and they
have the needed hardware and setup to do this.


> Or is that just another
> way of saying that you own all FreeBSD supported arches
> machines?  ;-)

I don't own an IA64 or PC98 machine.


> > I guess they provide a fun challenge
> > for you, but the rest of us that do release builds have come to totally
> > hate them.
> > 
> I'm not against dropping floppy support for some arches,
> I'm against splitting release.9 into MD parts that you did
> for no good reason (in my humble opinion).  If they aren't
> needed, the arch can set NO_FLOPPIES in release/Makefile.

The driver floppy isn't suffiently wrapped by NO_FLOPPIES, one still
builds it with NO_FLOPPIES set.  I also dare say that other than you, I,
and the RE's; no one knows what you're talking about with repect to
release.9 and this thread should just die.

> > > Overall, I think that having 9 architecture ifdefs for
> > 
> > You forgot the whole small, and if this exists and that exists, and then
> > do foo.
> 
> > The makefile is a mess.
> 
> We are real sorry, but it takes some thousands lines of
> code to build you the release for all arches.  ;)

How many lines of code do you think are in the kernel?  Heck, even nvi is
thousands of lines of code.  Things can be made cleaner.