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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!sgiblab!sgigate.sgi.com!olivea!decwrl!apple!kaleida.com!conklin From: conklin@kaleida.com (J.T. Conklin) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: GNU source tree (was: NIS (yp client) support in *BSD) Date: 15 Feb 1994 20:12:36 GMT Organization: Winning Strategies, Inc. Lines: 49 Message-ID: <CONKLIN.94Feb15121237@ngai.kaleida.com> References: <2jd12b$avc@ifado.arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de> <MYCROFT.94Feb11095728@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <2jq05l$bo6@mips.arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de> Reply-To: conklin@kaleida.com NNTP-Posting-Host: ngai.kaleida.com In-reply-to: wb@arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de's message of 15 Feb 1994 09:12:37 +0100 In article <2jq05l$bo6@mips.arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de> wb@arb-phys.uni-dortmund.de (Wilhelm B. Kloke) writes: >>> And I am not happy with the reordering done to the gnu tree, >>> because it makes it more difficult to be actual in GCC. At least, I >>> to get the stuff twice (from GNU AND NetBSD). >> >> None of the things you've mentioned are different under FreeBSD, so I >> don't see your point. > > The bad thing in reordering the GNU tree is that Gnu is adding steadily > new stuff, and I have different systems, e.g. Ultrix. Therefore I have to > update my stuff sometimes from GNU. Having it twice is not a very good > idea. And reordering stuff which is best gotten from some other source > is a bad idea from NetBSD. Iff there are enhancements like shared libs > this stuff should be submitted to the gnu effort. In my opinion, whenever a piece of software is integrated, it _becomes_ a part of NetBSD at that time. The GNU packages are not the only part of NetBSD that are primarily maintained by outside developers: cron, file, libm, m4, sendmail, etc. I don't think that any of the software in that category is integrated exactly as was distributed by their authors/maintainers. They are checked in (CVS vendor branches, in most cases) in such a way that changes in the "official" distribution can easily be integrated. It is in the best interest of those of us doing day-to-day maintanence to ensure that everything is consistant. Part of the "job" of the NetBSD team is new development and bug fixing; Another part is integration, testing, and release engineering. Requiring that every program use the same build mechanisms (berkeley makefile macros, etc.) makes it possible to do our "job's" effectively and efficently. It is true that you can't take the NetBSD gcc source and build it on another machine. It's not intended to. Each package is integrated with whatever changes specific to NetBSD's requirements. If a user's requirements are different, they may have to get the original distribution. The NetBSD developers don't operate in a vacuum. We share bug fixes and enhancements with the maintainers. But it is inevitable that NetBSD and they will have some differences in priorities, schedules, requirements, etc. that result in NetBSD contributions not being picked up into the official code base. --jtc