On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Simon Burge wrote:

> On the pmax, I can type
> "make release" and come back around 13 hours later with a directory in
> release(7) format including installation media.  Sure it's not perfect
> (checkflist and the INSTALL notes for example), but it beats doing it by
> hand any day.

Right. This was exactly why I implemented that chunk of it; I wanted
to let some of my machines run a few hours longer when building a
snapshot before I had to step in and do more manual stuff.

A lot of the stuff that's missing is actually MD stuff, not MI now.
So that's a lot more work to do, and has to be spread out among
different people.

> Those of us with machines where one can type "make build", grab a
> coffee, and then piece together a snapshot can probably afford to
> do something different :-)

In fact, I would have gone insane trying to program `make release'
if I'd not been doing it on such a machine. :-) (At the time a
`make release' took an hour and a quarter on it starting from
scratch--that was pre-egcs, though.)

For those who want to keep hacking at the release target to add
more stuff, feel free! I don't intend to do any more work on this
particular item; I want to look at ways of doing some more drastic
fixes to the build system to allow read-only source trees, multiple
simultaneous builds, and doing as much as possible as a non-root
user. That probably involves throwing out much of what we have now. 

I've set follow-ups to curent-users only.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   604 801 5335   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org