[illumos-Developer] [illumos Mono Integration - Feature #210]

[Alan Coopersmith]

James C. McPherson wrote:
> Sizewise, I believe that the Java consolidation is somewhere in the
> same ballpark. Not sure how large the SFW consolidation is, since
> they keep their bits as tarballs, but I expect it is actually larger.

I believe it is quite a bit larger if you expand the tarballs.

> Can't comment on the size of X, JDS/Gnome, Cluster or Studio and I
> don't see any reason why Studio (the compiler delivery vehicle) would
> be any smaller than ON or Java.

X is down to around 5 million lines since we finished purging Xsun.
JDS was around 19 million lines at one point (and I don't think that
included StarOffice/OpenOffice).   ON is only about 20% of the software
included in the OpenSolaris distro.

Besides the problems of bloating the ON build, putting externally maintained
software in ON is usually a mistake and waste of engineering time, since ON
has strict rules about things like cstyle, lint cleanliness, integrating
with the existing makefile system, not having dynamic dependency checking
(autoconf style), and so on - externally maintained software fits much better
into consolidations designed for that - SFW, X, & JDS all know how to deal
with these without trying to shoehorn it into a large body of software that
it doesn't fit into.   Certainly I've found it's much easier to maintain X
and keep in sync with upstream since we switched from the ON-like model
(check in each individual source file including the local fixes in a single
delta, so you can't tell which is upstream vs. local, and have to re-diff
& manually check in each source file for each new version) to the SFW/JDS like
model (pass through upstream tarballs unchanged, and use patch files to apply
local changes, so uprgrading to a new version is often as simple as changing
the upstream tarball).

>From what I've heard from Garrett and others (including complaints from those
trying to make the mistake of integrating external software into illumos
already), I would expect illumos to similarly be a poor fit for integrating
software that is externally maintained and for which illumos/ON isn't expected
to be the ongoing upstream source.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-        alan.coopersmith at oracle.com
	 Oracle Solaris Platform Engineering: X Window System