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

[Ian Collins]

On 08/16/10 11:34 AM, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-08-16 at 11:23 +1200, Ian Collins wrote:
>    
>> "Garrett D'Amore"<garrett at damore.org<http://lists.illumos.org/m/listinfo/developer>>   wrote:
>>      
>>> /  So one of the tasks that someone who doesn't want to work on kernel
>>>        
>> />/  code, but is interested in a significant bit of userland work would be
>> />/  to add the parallel/distributed features of dmake into the vanilla make
>> />/  sources we have.
>> />/
>> />/  We need it to be compatible with Sun dmake, so that we don't have to
>> />/  change a zillion lines of Makefile, nor ask other projects to do so.
>>
>> Does this imply a move away form the Studio tools?
>>
>> dmake may not be open source, but it is a tool we all have and one that wont be going away.
>>
>> So long as the makefiles aren't changed so they stop working with the current version, why reinvent the wheel?
>>
>> Interpreting the current makefiles is one problem, replicating the distributed features that make dmake so valuable is a much bigger task.
>>      
> We don't have the source for dmake, so we can't fix bugs in it.  We also
> can't port it to other platforms, which make projects involving
> portability to other platforms much harder.  (For example, porting to
> S/390, ARM, PowerPC, or MIPS. :-)
>
>    
OK, that makes sense.

I was discussing opening the dmake source with the developers during the 
OpenSolaris beta, but that never went anywhere (usual problems with 
licensed code).

> In fact, having a completely open tool chain is a real goal of the
> project.
>
>    
A good one too.  Having looked at re-implementing dmake's distributed 
features in the past, I know how big a job it is!

-- 
Ian.