[haiku-development] Re: External package woes (was What to do with termcap?)
- From: Landon Fuller <landonf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2013 09:36:40 -0500
On Feb 1, 2013, at 2:19 AM, Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm not going to address your examples. None of them is what I would consider
> an everyday use case (i.e. >99% of the work done on Haiku is not similar to
> any of those).
While it may not be 99% of the development time, neither is maintaining
third-party packages, and being able to deploy modern compilers (clang), ABI
changes (armv7), and simply evolve dependencies that cross packages, is
valuable work that has a very broad reach.
> Being able to automate as much as possible is certainly desirable. I doubt
> that we will be able to build the whole OS from the scratch automatically
> anytime soon, though. One major problem is that many software packages cannot
> be cross-built by default (even something as fundamental as bash falls into
> that category). Making/hacking them so that they can be cross-built is likely
> quite a lot of one-time and continuous maintenance work. I think it is more
> realistic that we get cross-building support going for the minimal set of
> software packages required to do native builds. A fully automatic OS build
> would then involve building most software in a VM.
The thing I find frustrating is that this used to work. It was an intentional
decision to move things out-of-tree before automation existed to maintain
things out-of-tree, even if that maintenance is done with non-cross builds. I
don't necessarily think supporting cross-development builds necessary makes for
every 3rd party package (it IS an enormous amount of work), but I will say, it
has made development of the core OS *so* much easier compared to my past
experiences on similar work, and I've thought it was really awesome that Haiku
supported (mostly) full cross-compilation.
-landonf
Other related posts:
