On Mon, Mar 13, 2000 at 11:18:36AM -0800, Chuck McManis wrote:
> #define RANT_MODE_ON
> 
> That this statement could be delivered without any incredulity at all is
> what I mean about the lack of discipline in open source projects. At some
> point there will be _no_ environment where the "next" or "current" release
> of the system can be built. And when that happens, all the newbies who
> haven't been building large scale software systems for the last 20 years
> will be shocked and dismayed and I'll be laughing my ass off.
> 
> There is "product"
> 
> There are "tools"
> 
> These are two different things. The manufacturing business has known this
> for at least 1600 years now. 
> 
> The "build system" is the tool used to build the release, and in a properly
> managed development environment the current build tools would be sacrosanct
> and 100% stable. This doesn't mean that the build tools can't evolve and
> change, just that they should be stablized _first_ then the build done.

We're talking about OS here, not random stand-alone software. Build of the
OS depends on the OS itself (chicken and eggs, you know), and you need to
upgrade the OS before processing forward (not to mention that a system
build is a very good regression test by itself). We often need new features
in the build tools to add features to the system. If we followed your
model we'd have a real chicken and eggs problem here.

--
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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