How to port to other UN*Xes? (was: Re: Inconsistent Architecture?)
Hi
William Lee Irwin III schrieb:
> On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 10:16:34PM +0200, Arthur Korn wrote:
> > In fact something like this would be needed if we port to
> > solaris, IRIX and AIX (hint: ironically) as well:
[ note: I help administering a 40 workstations solaris network
in the holidays. Allmost everything ppl use is in /usr/local/
(stowed) on a NetApp (NFS) and free software. The admins there
would be really happy to be able to manage that stuff with
apt-get (yes, I asked ...). Switching the whole thing to linux
would probably be to much work, but it is going to happen one
day ... even more since I work there ;). ]
> One thought I've had is that dealing with certain kinds of software
> (try GNOME) is a real pain on those systems in some (perhaps even
> typical) situations; even if the configure scripts are good enough to
> get you through an initial compilation by hand, it (1) takes forever,
> and (2) is very, very painful, and (3) almost impossible to upgrade
> by hand.
Another hassle is the whole gcc/automake/autoconf/make/binutils
combo, or apache (because it really ought to be up to date). The
time isn't that much a problem, we have a Ultra64 for compiling
... ;)
> Perhaps it sounds like an abuse of the package management system,
> but I personally would be thrilled to jump in on and help code some
> extensions to the package management system so that the following
> aspects of my former and current situations could be handled:
> (1) not being root and working entirely out of $HOME
> (2) $HOME being multihomed (i.e. NFS exported across machines of
> different OS's and architectures)
> (3) having system-supplied libraries (blas, X11, libc?) satisfy
> some(?) dependencies even though they aren't Debian-supplied.
I think a first step would be to modify souce packages in a way
so one can specify a prefix at build time (default would be
something like /debian/$(ARCH)-$(OSNAME)$(OSREL)/
(thinking of automounters ...).
A package like 'sunos28' could be used as a 'installer' that
helps doing the modifications to the root filesystem that might
be needed, and provide libc-whatever2.8Has and the shlibs files
and such for shlibdeps to work (versioned provides will be
really helpful here).
We don't need to modify the entire distribution, only the whole
working environment including development tools, editors,
typesetters, shells and such plus the irreplaceable stuff such
as apache, lprng, pgsql, mysql and tools like stow, top,
fileutils, shellutils and some more. (Ok, it's allmost
everything ... ;)
> These thoughts reflect some of my experiences as a university student
> and as a new entry to the workforce.
And my experience in a busy private research institute with even
more busy admins ...
ciao, 2ri
--
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned
in school. -- A. Einstein
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