On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Curt Sampson wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Nov 1997, Mark H. Levine wrote:
> 
> > OK, then please let me ask what the philosophy is _here_ :).  In all
> > seriousness, saying the toolchain is not part of the release is, in
> > my view as a commercial adopter, shooting yourself in the foot with a
> > shotgun, assuming that you still want this OS to be used by businesses.
> 
> Well, feel free to do the integration necessary to make it part of
> the release. (The quick summary: make the current cygnus toolchain
> do dynamic linking of a.out format executables, and then we can
> replace the current in-tree toolchain and the alpha will then be
> able to use it, instead of having to have its own separate toolchain.)
> 
> Yes, it's obvious the alpha port isn't as mature as the i386 or
> sparc port is (both of which have the toolchain integrated). You
> have three choices here:
> 
>     1. Fix the problems. If you need a list, send me e-mail; I can
>     supply you with at least two solid years of work.
> 
>     2. Pay someone to fix the problems. Again, if you're interested
>     in this contact me and I can get you hooked up with a developer.
> 
>     3. Wait until someone, of their own free will and good nature,
>     fixes these. Generally these are people who, like me, have full
>     time jobs and are working on this in their spare time, so don't
>     expect things to happen instantly.
> 
    Actually there is another obvious option:

      4. Convert the current a.out using ports to using ELF, that way
      all ports can use the current cygnus toolchain.
      (I'm sure at least some people would have that as a long term goal
      anyway, but this could get religious :)

> Oh, I suppose you do have a fourth option, which is to complain to
> port-alpha, but I'm afraid that's effectively the same as number 3.
> 
> > But what I would like
> > to try and suggest is that NetBSD as an organization and the Alpha port team
> > as a group adopt a policy of bundling the toolchain, and its sources, with
> > the NetBSD release (every snapshot!), always.
> 
> It's available at the same time. I can't make it part of the release,
> because I'm not going to stick seventy megabytes of platform-specific
> source code into our main source tree that is used by every platform.
> Sorry.
> 
> I don't really understand what your problem is with this, anyway.
> Is the system really unusable if you have to untar one more file
> to do the install, and if some of the programs you use run from
> /usr/local/bin instead of /usr/bin? Can you explain to me exactly
> how this makes life so difficult for you?
> 
	It could be that we're down to terminology and phrasing here.
	The cygnus toolchain source is part of the NetBSD/alpha
	architecture specific release. Its 'bundled' in the alpha
	directory of each release and snapshot.
	
	The appropriate Makefiles in the main tree could automatically
	look 'across' into where the toolchain source lives so a
	'make build' can do the right thing (for suitably generous
	definitions of 'the right thing').
	This would give a much better 'feel' for someone compiling the
	alpha port, without requiring a complete integration into
	the main source tree (just a suggestion :)

		David/abs

          .:. "I'm not an angel... I'm not that quaint..." .:.