[OpenAFS-devel] Re: OpenAFS-devel digest, Vol 1 #25 - 13 msgs

[Derrick J Brashear]

On 12 Dec 2000, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Derrick J Brashear <shadow@dementia.org> writes:
> 
> > We wanted to get something out there for people to play with. Autoconf
> > involves breaking the whole world for the duration of the work,
> > basically.
> 
> Hm.  It might not *have* to.  We managed to avoid that when
> autoconfiscating INN, for example.  Sometimes you can use autoconf to
> generate a file that defines all the stuff that the legacy code expects,
> and then slowly remove the legacy definitions as they're stripped out of
> the rest of the code.
> 
> But it depends on how the code's structured and how it uses portability
> information and I haven't done a thorough inspection of OpenAFS yet to
> figure out a good approach.

Well, nothing in AFS is based on feature definitions, it's all based on
systype stuff. The logical way to handle non-kernel stuff is to work on
feature-based definitions, which is going to make the old build system
break as things get converted unless 2 sets of portability information are
kept and we switch to the new one when we get all the feature stuff done.

It seems that it would be less time consuming to just have 2 trees (a
stable tree and a devel tree) and break the devel tree for a few weeks
while autoconfiscation happens. My plan was to work on it or find others
to do so, imminently.

-D