Re: CVSUP and 5.2.1 RELEASE

At 9:08 PM +0200 7/13/04, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
>
>If you sit back for a moment and think about the number of barriers
>a user must already scale to get to the point of typing "make world",

If you also think about the real-world users who do in fact get
screwed by this target, then one wonders what we would really
lose if we changed the situation.

>then I think you will see that adding 27 extra characters is not
>going to change anything.  In particular not when compared the the
>number of places we have to change (to the extent we can)
>documentation which mentions "make world".

"make world" performs a sequence of operations which are expressly
wrong.  Why we have a WRONG target is a better question than how
much work it would be to change the documentation.

As to the documentation, we can have a "make world" target which
prints out:

      This target has been removed because it often causes trouble
      for users in many situations.  While our documentation does
      talk about "make world", that phrase is just a convenient
      short phrase to refer to the several steps needed to upgrade
      your system.  Please read the upgrade instructions in <wherever>
      for the safer way to upgrade your system.

We can then have an "xworld" target (or some other name) for those
who wish to things in the present order.  We (as a project) explicitly
berate users who follow suggestions from our own documentation and
then clobber their system with this troublesome target.  I, for one,
do not see what is gained by leaving this dangerous, frequently foot-
shooting target the way that it is -- ESPECIALLY if we have any
documentation which might suggest that users should use it.

So, while you are sitting back and thinking, could you remind me
what we GAIN by leaving the target the way it is?  I have somehow
managed to build FreeBSD on six different systems and two different
hardware platforms over the past five years or so without typing
"make world" once.  Wtf do we need to keep it for?

(I know I used it in the distant past, but I can not remember the
last time I did...)

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad_at_gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad_at_freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih_at_rpi.edu