[advocacy-discuss] Re: Porting Community

[Michal Bielicki]

Ron Kleinman wrote:
> Dennis Clarke wrote:
>>> Maybe we should start a porting community for all that stuff that gets
>>> ported or will be ported to opensolaris, iandiana, solaris or however we
>>> call it. And with it a place to host all these projects ?
>>>     
> Advocacy-ites,
>
>   Actually this parallels the approved charter  of the (still closed)
> migration-tools project in the former Immigrant's Community.  See:
>
>     http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/migration-tools/
>
>   The approved charter is:
>
>     /The goal of this project is to provide a central location for a
>     growing source code repository of generic tools and associated
>     documentation, designed to ease / automate the various tasks
>     involved in porting applications and scripts from a variety of
>     other Unixes (Unixii?) to OpenSolaris.
>
>     I am seeking seconds for the proposal and an endorsement from the
>     leaders of the Immigrants Community, as this project seems fully
>     in keeping with the community  charter. Initially all we'd need is
>     a project space, assuming project members could share the existing
>     list.
>
>     One expected submittal for early collaboration is a Java based
>     tool (JSCORE) that uses a defined "before / after" ASCII text file
>     (specific to either HP-UX or AIX), to match on any "before" string
>     in a submitted ASCII C/C++ file and convert it to the "after"
>     string, thereby reducing the effort to port an alternative Unix
>     application to OpenSolaris.  Note in this case, the proceedure
>     could be made reversible by simply switching the before and after
>     strings.
>
>     One set of additional submittals / development would likely  be
>     centered around providing emulation library modules for such
>     things as "longtostring()" functions which incoming "immigrant"
>     applications may require. /
>
>   I was only able to devote a small amount of effort to this due to a
> Sun internal re-org, but I always felt there was more here than a
> project structure could accomplish.  Something like an OpenSolaris
> Porting Community, with general best practices, generic tools (ex:
> JSCORE) and process tips at the top level might well be the best way
> to address this topic.  Individual projects under that community could
> focus specifically on a single alternative OS platform, generating
> lists of porting differences / problem points in OS APIs, scripts,
> install packaging), etc. 
>
>   One could even have a project to ease migration of applications from
> earlier versions of Solaris to OpenSolaris.  Not as strange as it
> might seem. 
>
>     Example:  Calling closedir() twice on the same directory pointer
>     in Solaris 8 doesn't cause a problem, in OpenSolaris it crashes
>     the program. 
>
>   IMHO, it would be useful to have a collection point for that sort of
> stuff, to help developers trying to port their applications to
> OpenSolaris from a variety of platforms?  I'm just not certain whether
> that point would be the Advocacy Community, or a separate Porting 
> community totally dedicated to porting and porting projects.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ronk
>
THat is what I am trying to suggest :)