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Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!olivea!uunet!mcsun!Germany.EU.net!unidui!du9ds3!veit From: veit@du9ds3 (Holger Veit) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: Shared Libraries for 386BSD (long, w/source) Message-ID: <veit.723114729@du9ds3> Date: 30 Nov 92 09:12:09 GMT References: <lohse.722861707@tech7> <JKH.92Nov27145531@whisker.lotus.ie> <veit.722878428@du9ds3> <1602@hcshh.hcs.de> Reply-To: veit@du9ds3.uni-duisburg.de Organization: Uni-Duisburg FB9 Datenverarbeitung Lines: 178 NNTP-Posting-Host: du9ds3.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de Reply to <1602@hcshh.hcs.de> hm@hcshh.hcs.de (Hellmuth Michaelis): I don't want to discuss your various concerns in detail, the posting will ever grow, and many topics have been discussed already before. 1. It is true that I have Internet access, and you and a large number of persons might not have. It is one of the difficulties of the 386bsd project that this is the case, and this, together with the really heterogeneous status of the readership (in terms of groups "users/hackers", "newbies/wizards", "internet/usenet", "casual/permanent readers" etc.) is the reason why I would consider it not a good idea to discuss critical things like kernel modifications in this public forum. No one, not even I (although you complain about exactly this) will suppress progress, but a way that is chosen in the wrong way once, and known and loved by lots of interested people cannot easily be left. (I talk about "kernel" and "nonkernel" modifications below further). The problem of casual and permanent readers/posters makes the situation more complicated. You and I follow c.u.b. quite long and we should therefore know the general trend, but for the casual reader this is not clear. I wouldn't dare to post some piece of critical code if I were not sure whether there are not some other pieces of code addressing exactly the same problem. Perhaps I have learnt during my research, that one should first gather all information before there should be an action. This is difficult with a (probably unreliable) USENET link, but this was one of the reasons the workgroups at ref.tfs.com were made for. !! Julian: can you comment on whether and how someone interesting in work can obtain a list of workgroups (posted some time ago) and can participate in such a group by e-mail only? 2. On progress and compatibility: You miss my main concern. It is true that any progress may break some feature of software developed earlier. The problem begins if there are independent versions of a software aiming at the same area or, in case of the posted shared libraries, inherent incompatibility to own future compilations. We have the currently bad situation that there are for instance the following mainly incompatible versions of console drivers: 1. The original pccons 2. The pccons PL 58 with X11 patches 3. Some improvements made to 2. (bell, etc.) 4. The danish driver with VTs, which needs further patches and modifications for X11 (in the Xserver) 5. Your vgadrv with vt100 support and some other improvements 6. My codrv (the name already say that it is different) 7. The announced version of your improved pccons (with unknown improvements) 8. My (not yet announced, but coming) new version of codrv (with improvements I know :-)) 9. (Ralf Friedel's VT modification to the 0.0 pccons, which 4. and in parts 5. is based on) 10. Foreign code from BSD386. As a "user", I would be highly confused what to take now. I would like to have 2./3. (to retain compatibility with my old xserver), 5. to get vt100 support, 4. to let my old SYSV apps run without problems, and 6. (because there are some strange effects in 2./3. for X11). This would be a wish for a 9th version, but 1./2./3./4. are incompatible with 5./6. for X11, and all of them are incompatible among other things. To clarify again: If you write your "refrigerator" driver, and I write a driver for my "hifi-tower", there will be no problem. I strongly encourage you to make your "refrigerator" driver available, even if it is of no use for me (see below about the means how to make it available). If you port gcc-9.9.9 to 386bsd and I do the same, there will be also no harm (just, that anyone of us could have done other better things instead of duplicate work). This is because gcc-9.9.9 does not afflict future directions of 386bsd, and the world can live with the existing gcc-8.8.8 (so it can without a "hifi" and "refrigerator"-driver, because the system already worked without it). I will encourage anyone to post things in such an uncritical area. For instance, there have been several postings regarding the mysterious bug in the xview library (cmdtool crashing). No one has fixed it yet, but any hint is worth trying (BTW, recompiling with gcc-2.3.1 does not help). If you write a VFS for the frequently used "ding-dong" filesystem and I do the same, and you assume to have all the existing data to be overwritten with 0xff, and I need 0xE5 for that, we might have a problem, and we should communicate about what to do. If you write a completely new driver interface, and I do the same, but in a different way, and both seem to have advantages and disadvantages, but it is clear that one of them must be in 386bsd 0.66, then posting both interfaces and letting the usership decide which is better is a kind of democracy I do not want to see. Nothing against democracy, but this example shows exactly a problem which should be discussed in the "wizards' circles" before being thrown on the community. There is enough work for the "non-wizard", don't just try to select the problems which may have a maximum of side effects. The "wizards" are the ones with the overall insight, and will find a solution that is satisfying for many, not just for you and your perhaps restricted environment. Since you and I work on different shapes of the same medal, you surely have gotten as much user response on vgadrv as I was sent on codrv. The different requirements people have had where amazing, surprising and shocking alltogether, but I will try to get them under a hat and make most out of it. This is why I don't try to confuse people with new versions every week, and this is exactly Bill's attitude. In this context I was quite angry to see the "shared-library" posting, with the trailing remark that the poster now leaves for a new job, and will be no longer available for support or questions (until he can establish a new connection at his new job; if he can at all). Can you imagine how many people will take this code, analyse it and try to understand how shared libraries (which they are encouraged to do; people, study to become wizards!) and try to hack it into an improved version? With the existing delay in the usenet of a number of days, you might see a new version tomorrow, and three further independent versions in the next week. Can you also imagine that - due to the critical area that is touched here - there will be RSN versions of binary releases of popular software using this type of shlib? In my mind I really see the X11 with shared libraries on a number of ftp servers, and you carefully have to look for the version date, because any fix in one of the libraries will now cause the entire set of X11 be released again (Of course you can also hold N different libX11_s.a on your system). 3. On asking the wizards and Bill or Lynne's right to release the guidelines: Terry, IMK, didn't ask Bill for posting, but the patchkit is non essential for the future way of 386bsd, it just makes life more comfortable. I asked Bill, and he recommended the general guideline which is now implemented in keycap/codrv. >Did Lynne or Bill Jolitz waited for getting acknowledge from someone before >they did the unthinkable ? Bill Himself, of course, does not have to ask anyone before he decides to do something. If you complain about that, you forget the HE was the one who made this work available to YOU, at his cost and efforts, and that you and all the known and unknown hacker and users here in this group were not speaking about anything if HE wasn't the one to make 386bsd live. Many here, including you with your claim of "ultimate freedom of posting anything at anytime", forget the rule that the one who pays the music also decides the tune! And BTW, you won't compare yourself with Bill, will you? Call me a wizard or not (I DO NOT call me one), I won't even think of that. 4. On posting: >And, Holger, would you please leave ME the freedom to decide what i want >to post (in conformance with the netiquette and the purpose of the group >to post into) ?? >And, Holger, would you please leave ME the freedom to decide what i want >to let my eyes have a look at and let MY cpu the freedom to process what >ever it likes ?? >This includes the freedom to choose to install the green, red or yellow >refrigerator device driver, EVEN if the red one might crash MY system and >the yellow one is your favorite one !! The netiquette strongly recommends to avoid posting into non source groups, and the existing c.u.b. is a discussion group. Since you have a USENET link over (possibly slow and low capacity) serial links, you should object against large source postings, whether they are possibly useful for YOU or not. You might use the ftpbymail service if you think it is worth for you, but then you are interested in spending your money and are not forced to spend for unknown goodies. This is why I haven't posted my codrv code to USENET; it is too large, but I am willing to send a package to anyone who wants to have it by mail. The comp.os.386bsd.* in discussion may have or have not a source group, I don't want to discuss about new groups here. You may also execute your green refrigerator driver on your system, as well as I run my yellow (which I personally think for me is the best, and if anyone asks, I will recommend to use my yellow one) on my system. But then we have our own 386bsd-hv and 386bsd-hm systems, and everything that we think that should be in 386bsd-jolix should be coordinated with the master maintainer of 386bsd-jolix. >hellmuth >-- >hellmuth michaelis HCS Hanseatischer Computerservice GmbH hamburg, europe >hm@hcshh.hcs.de tel: +49/40/55903-170 fax: +49/40/5591486 Holger -- | | / Dr. Holger Veit | INTERNET: veit@du9ds3.fb9dv.uni-duisburg.de |__| / University of Duisburg | "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX | | / Dept. of Electr. Eng. | Sorry, the above really good fortune has | |/ Inst. f. Dataprocessing | been CENSORED because of obscenity"