Re: Fwd: Status and future of 3rd party ABI compatibility layer

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2011 at 12:40:44AM +0000, Andrew Doran wrote:
 > With modules now basically working we should either retire or move
 > some of these items to pkgsrc so that the interested parties maintain them.
 > An awful lot of the compat stuff is now very compartmentalised, with not
 > much more work to do.

There's at least one thing on the long-term wishlist that ideally
should be done first: migrating to code generation for the syscall
copyin/copyout logic. Given such infrastructure, much of the compat_*
code can be replaced with code generator rules.

Also, we really need a better story for compiling modules outside the
source tree. Installing every random kernel header in /usr/include
isn't the right way to go, but we don't currently have enough internal
API organization to do much better. (Alternatively, we could come up
with a better story for providing a system source tree in pkgsrc, but
that also has issues.)

 > > > Darwin (no GUI, doesn't to have been updated in the last 5 years)
 > > > IRIX
 > 
 > These two are strange and very broken, i.e. internally they are in
 > very bad shape.  I vote to delete.  The version control history will still
 > be there.  Can't see strong use cases for either.

I don't know that much about compat_darwin, but compat_irix is a pile
of ooze. Someone please delete it :-)

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost