[FreeVMS] Re: still need more developers


Subject: [FreeVMS] Re: still need more developers
From: Patrick Caulfield (patrick@tykepenguin.com)
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 10:55:25 CEST


On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 01:19:27PM +0200, roart@nvg.ntnu.no wrote:
>
> On Sun, Aug 25, 2002 at 09:45:40AM +0100, Patrick Caulfield wrote:
> >
> > Speaking for myself, I find the difficulty of building the FreeVMS kernel a
> > major barrier. It's not just that it needs a compiler I don't have (Redhat's
> > 2.97 or whatever) but the prescript never seems to work adequately for me
>
> Exactly what goes wrong with prescript?

I wish I knew. maybe nothing, I get some file already exists message. and then
the compilation fails with header files not found. Then I'm off on the same old
roundabout. Maybe if I was more organised I would make a list of the things I
had to change to make it work each time.

> (Ok, it may happen some symlinks are placed in the wrong place sometimes)
> Last time you seemed only to have problems with the compiler and having
> chosen VMS MM (and got crashes in the page frame allocator).
>
> Didn't you try gcc 3 later on, and got it booted?

I did yes, and thanks for your help on that. The problem is it seems to take me
rather a long time to get it all going from one release to the next. I think my
troubles are related to using gcc 3 rather than 2.97
 
>
> Not that much, actually only a few of the files change from release to
> release.
> Maybe you should use CVS instead, so you can get smaller changes and will
> not have to start again at each release?

Thanks I'll look into CVS.

I don't want to impinge on your time too much with my particular problems, apart
from the fact that I should be perfectly capable of solving them myself(!) I
don't have as much free time as I would like for this sort of thing but I really
would like to help where I can.

> > This is not meant as a whinge, there's lots of good work being done on the
> > project but maybe putting some effort into lowering the bar to entry might be
> > worth someones time. Perhaps providing the kernel source as a patch (or even a
> > complete download for those with broadband) might be a start
>
> A plain patch might be the thing if you just want to compile it.
> I will look into it at the next release.

I think it would help people who want to work on the userland code.

Another idea:
One think we do at work is to have a bitkeeper repository (though it could
equally well be done with CVS) of the whole Linux kernel with our modifications
applied. When a new kernel release happens then those changes are merged into
the CVS tree, so users sync with that and get a whole, (hopefully!) working
kernel tree.

patrick

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