[advocacy-discuss] Porting Community

[Ron Kleinman]

Jim Grisanzio wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>
> Well, I think a porting community has been brought up from time to 
> time and I think a distros community was also brought up recently but 
> I'm not going there. :) Entire communities for those purposes are 
> outside the scope of this community group. But people felt that the 
> Immigrants Community ought to be part of the Advocacy merger, so 
> that's why you are here. Any associated projects should also be part 
> of that merger unless you feel that you need to be part of another 
> effort, which would be fine, of course. I've always felt that the 
> Advocacy CG would have both technical and non-technical projects. And 
> I think it will.
>
> Jim


Jim,

 Fair enough.  The purpose of  "migration-tools" is pretty clear.  Right 
now, despite being a single project, I could imagine an eventual series 
of allied projects (one per alternative OS, one for script conversions, 
one looking at building with gcc, etc.) with a common framework of best 
practices and such.  But we aren't there yet.

  So given its present state of development, I'm agreeable to leaving 
the "migration-tools" project in the Advocacy Community (assuming there 
aren't objections from community members).  But if folks think there's a 
better home for it (where?)  or it should be upleveled into a seperate 
community, please let me know?

Much thanks,

Ronk