organization

[John-Mark Gurney]

mohamed aslan wrote this message on Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 07:41 -0800:

Also, learn not to top post...  it looses context...

> guys this is not a flame war
> but the linux way in arranging the source file is really better than
> freebsd way, it's a fact.

well, as I stated in a previous email, if you make a statement without
detailing your reasons, many people feel that you are attacking FreeBSD..
You should be impressed that you didn't get more flames...

> however it's easy to rearrange it in 1 min as someone said before.
> but i mean this step should be done from the core team.

No, this step should only be done by the repo manager...  and let
the people who have extensive experience handle it..  in some cases, it
means that we'll have to keep two copies of the files for a long time so
that all branches are properly buildable, or we'll have to go back and
change all the old branches to make sure they use the new location..

That's a large undertaking...

> for example all fs has to go in a subdir called fs

well, not even NetBSD does this, and they are "better organized" than
FreeBSD is...  but luckily, you can just do ls -d *fs and get them...
Though the reasons that ufs and nfs and isofs aren't in the fs is
hysterical raisins...  It's been a while since I looked at this, but
I was surprised how many were in the fs dir.. so, this is more of a
minor point..

> arch specific file should go in subdir called arch/(arch name)
> and so on .
> if ls the files in freebsd sys subdir , u will got about 54 subdirs
> and a makefile while linux contains about 15 subdirs only.

Again, FreeBSD was originally only i386 (and pc64), and for a long
time, only a two arch project..  it wasn't till a few years ago that
we started to grow many new arches (amd64, ia64, sparc64, powerpc, arm,
and others)..  So, at the time, putting i386 (and pc98 and alpha) at
the top level made sense, but now that we have so many, yes, it doesn't
make sense, but at the same time the cost (as others have layed out)
is expensive to do....

Also, as time permits, such as when new drivers are written, old drivers
retires, drivers rewritten, things are improving...  such as the dev dir,
instead of putting the drivers in isa, they are moved into dev.. one
example is sio.c..  that used to be an isa device driver, but now lives
in dev/sio + the various bus attachments since it is no longer isa
specific...

> guys, don't take my words against bsd , i admit that the performace of
> bsd is much better than linux and i'm planning to change to it as my
> primary os. but we can get the good things from linux and through out
> the bad ones.

Or at least the ideas.. :)  we can't take in too much GPL code into the
tree.. then it'd just be pointless... :)

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."