On Thu, 24 May 2001, Ben Harris wrote:

> On Wed, 23 May 2001, Chris Gilbert wrote:
>
> > On Wednesday 23 May 2001 12:16 pm, Ben Harris wrote:
> > > Ah, but they'll all be in different places.  We'll have
> > > cats/sets/kern.tgz, acorn32/sets/kern.tgz, etc.
> >
> > Ok, so we then have a shared arm dir eventually for the other sets?
>
> Eventually.  Look in NetBSD-1.5/shared/* to see the list.  At the moment,
> comp has to be distinct because of header files (this should be fixed) and
> base needs to be separate because of /dev/MAKEDEV (I think).

	Most of the other common MACHINE_ARCH ports are moving towards a
	completely sharable userland. arm32 has the advantage of starting
	from one :) It would be really nice if it could be kept completely
	sharable for 1.6.

	There are some initial notes at

	http://www.netbsd.org/developers/notes.html#sharing-userland

	Interestingly the two things not mentioned are includes and MAKEDEV :)

	IIRC /usr/include/machine should go away or switch to being
	MACHINE_ARCH sharable, and anything MACHINE specific should be
	referenced directly via <cats/whatever.h>.

	MAKEDEV is a more interesting problem - for arm32 we could get away
	with a single version, but other ports merging are going to hit a
	harder problem. Initial options would be:
	   - MAKEDEV gets _very_ ugly on m68k and suchlike.
	   - Shared ports MAKEDEV calls MAKEDEV.$MACHINE
	   - We bail entirely and swith to devfs

	I would guess the second option...

-- 
		David/absolute		-- www.netbsd.org: No hype required --