[openbeos] Re: [haiku-development] Coordinating ports (#2) (was: Re: Distributed Version Control Tools)
- From: "Michael Lotz" <mmlr@xxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2008 23:02:11 +0200
Hi Andreas
> I certainly do NOT consider it my job to surf the Web and search for
> outdated ports of software.
I haven't suggested that you search for outdated patches. I suggest
that anyone considering porting software should take a good look around
first because this very thing might already exist.
> I haven't noticed you on the qemu-devel list lately, so if you have
> it working and that good knowledge of its inner workings
Oh well, I asked for that...
> why are there no upstream patches from you?!
There are no upstream patches for one simple reason: we are using gcc
2.95.3. This is a compiler that doesn't even support C99. That's why
patches to get QEMU working require anything that for example puts
declarations not at the top of the block (a previous requirement of C
code) needs to be edited. I've for example put large numbers of {} into
some of those files to simply start a new block whenever a variable is
declared (because just moving them would be even more time consuming as
they usually bring initializations with them that depend on being where
they are...). Then QEMU does many tricks with code to get its speed to
a reasonable level. Some of those tricks simply do not work under such
an ancient compiler like ours (register declarations after
functions...) and therefore need some hacks to get things going.
I would not even consider merging anything like this into a project and
I wouldn't suggest putting these patches upstream, because it breaks
the design of otherwise (for all paltforms except us) fine code. That's
why there are no upstream patches from me.
This does not hinder anyone from asking me for a patch or a complete
buildable source package though. It just requires that one does a bit
of research and realizes that it exists already. I have given out such
packages previously, I just want to make sure that the people that are
requesting them know why the things look/are hacky in some spots.
That's why I don't just put a patch on my website, but rather email it
out with proper explanations and instructions how to get it working.
This is extra work for me which I invest to keep the quality of the
work as high as possible with the constrained resources we have. So I
would simply find it nice if others would also invest a bit of time to
first take a look around.
This whole text obviously does not justify that I have attacked you
with my first response more than I have intended, for which I'd like to
appologize. Let's say I had an "interesting" day today and seeing this
going on (the duplicate work thing) and then seeing that you might be
right on track to do the same thing with a QEMU port I invested
considerable time into already, did tick me off a bit.
Regards
Michael
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