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

[Jerome Warnier]

On Sun, 2010-08-15 at 16:34 -0700, 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. :-)

Guys, the OpenOffice.org team in Debian is using an Open Source dmake,
which is said to be a modified version of the original public domain
one. And it successfully builds OOo, and this is quite a huge and
complicated piece of code, don't you think?

Am I missing something?

> In fact, having a completely open tool chain is a real goal of the
> project.
> 
> I would like people to be able to use studio if they want to.  But I
> want that to be a choice that the developers or distribution builders
> make.  It shouldn't be forced on them because we have no other choices.
> 
> 	- Garrett