Re: Test implementation?
Hi,
On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 08:11:43PM +0200, David N. Welton wrote:
> Sorry for the crosspost, however, I haven't seen much at all going on
> in the -impl archives.
Sorry for the cross-reply. Further mails will be sent to lsb-impl only.
Yes, you are right, there wasn't much activity "visible" on this list.
The reason being is that only since about 6 weeks I and others have been
really starting to push that with the necessary manpower behind. Caldera
e.g. now has 4 people working almost full-time on that and other distros
also start lining up the manpower needed now to help.
As I am "officially leading" the LSB implementation team let me explain
you where we currently are and what the next steps will be.
I wanted to post this anyway this week but as you ask, I will do it now ;-)
o We investigated all existing major distros, to see what technology
is already there and can be reused or slightly modified to match the
spec and pass the test suites. We don't want to write everything from
scratch but rather use existing technology wherever possible.
o I contacted the development leads of some of the major distributions
and arranged meeting with them and their LSB engs within the next two
weeks in order to discuss/learn about some of their tools and how we
can best modify/use them to meet the spec. I will meet with Turbo Linux
next Monday, with Caldera next Tuesday and with RedHat next Friday. The
week after that with SuSE and hopefully Mandrake. Others distros to
follow soon after that.
o We compiled a list of things, that need to be done/written. I am still
working on that but I hope to post this to this list by the end of this
week, at least before I start traveling and meeting with them.
o We started bootstrapping a minimal runtime system that complies to
the spec. Basically this was done by using a typical minimal system
and reducing it to only the files/binaries that are allowed due to
the spec. In reality you need some things more than are currently
spec'ed. We kept them in a separate package and will bring all those
things up shortly on the lsb-spec list for review/rediscussion.
o Starting with the runtime system we currently try to build a development
system, that will produce LSB compliant binaries. This is on our plate
this week.
o Once we have the development system complete enough, we will rebuild
the runtime and development system again using a process we call
self-hosting, so bootstrapping yourself in 3 phases much like GCC does.
1. A development system recompiles a development system from sources
2. The resulting development system rebuilds itself
3. The now clean (fixpoint!) development system rebuilds itself again
and also all the other packages too.
That's the process we use in building Caldera OpenLinux and that has
proven to be very good to have a clean development system.
Once we have doen this it will allow us to upload a clean source base
to SourceForge and that was planned as the "visible" starting point.
We did not want to upload something that can't rebuild itself and was
just "hacked" together somehow. We believe that a good quality start
is crucial to the success of it.
o Once we have uploaded that, we hope that many people will download it,
take a look at it and send patches and feedback. We will also certainly
need help from people to implement pieces that have to be written from
scratch or heavily modified from existing solutions.
> Actually, that is really my question. Is anyone working on a sample
> implementation in parallel with the other efforts?
Yes, there is. The reason why you haven't seen anything yet is that we
have to have a critical mass that makes sense for others to download
and play with. We hope to have this available before the end of May.
If there are people willing to help even in this early stage, please
contact me and I will think about ways to cut out some pieces for you
so that you don't have to download hundreds of MB every day to stay
in sync with the major changes we currently do.
Ralf
--
_____ ___
/ __/____/ / Caldera (Deutschland) GmbH
/ /_/ __ / /__ Naegelsbachstr. 49c, 91052 Erlangen
/_____//_/ /____/ Dipl. Inf. Ralf Flaxa, email: rf@caldera.de
==== /_____/ ====== phone: ++49 9131 7192 311, fax: ++49 9131 7192 399
Caldera OpenLinux PGP: 6D 02 48 48 87 9C 6A 9C 30 A8 4D 15 AC CA 96 10
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