propose: all arch move into a separate dir
Robert Watson
rwatson at FreeBSD.org
Fri Mar 5 09:17:02 UTC 2010
On Thu, 4 Mar 2010, paradox wrote:
> so, I really do not understand why it is so difficult to move a few folders
> in the shared folder is a big problem as is done in openbsd and netbsd
> http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/sys/arch/?only_with_tag=MAIN
> http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/arch/ as you can see
I would hesitate to say that there are "no" large forks of OpenBSD/NetBSD in
products, but it may well be that the maintainers of those forks are less
involved in their communities. We have downstream consumers like Isilon,
NetApp, Juniper, and many others who have significant kernel features
maintained against our tree. It's not just them either: we are our own
downstream consumers. Every major branched project in Subversion, Perforce,
or external git repositories, will have significant local changes.
Every time we go wild rearranging the tree, they have to pick up the mess
trying to figure out how to forward-merge changes -- and as someone who has
been on the wrong end of that (the TrustedBSD work took 5+ years to go from
inception to merge), I can say it's a really painful experience. It's not
impossible, it's just a huge amount of work.
This isn't to say we shouldn't do occasional rearrangements, but the argument
has to be made pretty carefully that the gratuitous rename of the day offers a
significant benefit, worth potentially dislodging all the downstream trees and
requiring them to remerge all their work. It can't just be "oh, if only we
had five fewer directories at the top of the sys tree", because that's *not*
worth it.
Doing that kind of rearrangement on the network stack would be a nightmare for
anyone with large network stack patches, so I'd say we could pretty much rule
that out outright. I'm not sure how things compare in the machine-dependent
code trees, but I'd guess there are people with non-trivial changes there as
well.
Robert
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