[illumos-Developer] interesting userland project -- non-trivial

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Sun, 2010-08-15 at 22:31 +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
> "Garrett D'Amore" <garrett at damore.org> wrote:
> 
> > I think trying to get to the point that smake can build ON would be very
> > useful.
> >
> > > 
> > > Did someone already try to compile ON using the simple sunpro make?
> >
> > When I build I use /usr/ccs/bin/make.  This does include parallelization
> > features.
> 
> Onless you changed "nightly" or fiddle with environment variables, "dmake" will 
> be called instead.

Probably. I use "make" in individual directories when I build sub
components, but I wonder if bldenv changed my path.... I'll need to
check that.

> 
> 
> > > Let me make a note: I am not willing to support some non-POSIX behavior from
> > > sunpro make. This is the usage of the dynamic macros "$*" and "$<" for explicit
> > > target rules. This usage is a bug (these macros only have defined values in case
> > > an inplicit target rule is executed) and would need to be fixed in the makefiles.
> > > As smake writes a warning in such a case, it is easy to find.
> >
> > If the fixes to the Makefiles are easy to make, and there are not a
> > large number of Makefiles that rely on this, then I'm willing to accept
> > this limitation.
> 
> There are 71 potentially incorrect calls to "$*", I cannot easily count the number 
> of incorrect calls to "$<". There are ~ 3000 calls but the vast majority is 
> obviously legal calls.

So, we dont' really know the scope yet... it may be manageable.  I'll
keep my fingers crossed. :-)

> 
> > However, if we find that a large percentage of Sun Makefiles (such as in
> > ON) use these constructs in ways that would be hard to correct, then I
> > think we will need to reconsider.  The goal here is to provide a
> > solution that is minimally disruptive.
> 
> Let us try to bring smake close to be able to compile, then smake will list the 
> incorrect calls as warnings.

Sounds like an excellent plan.  Can you do this work?


> > > There is currently no plan to support distributed features but there is a plan 
> > > to add parallel make support.
> >
> > Ok, well parallelization would be the most important anyway.  I've never
> > used the distributed functionality.
> 
> This is interesting, as it seems that Sun did add the distributed feature in a 
> time when machines did have very few CPUs. In theory, this is doable but I 
> currently don't see a real usage for this feature.


Agreed.  The trend is more cpus on the same system.

If we can get this resolved, it will address the vast majority of common
uses of dmake/pmake, I think.

	- Garrett