[ On Sunday, January 9, 2005 at 00:36:36 (+0300), Denis Lagno wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: HEADS UP: XFree86 3.3.6 has been EOLed 
>
> > And it makes sense to have it inside src because it _is_ a part of the
> > system.
> 
> oh, please no.  I use original XFree86 cvs sources,
> and do not want to check out unneeded 300 megs of sources in xsrc.

Yes, I know it's big, but it's not huge.

Also, keep in mind that what I'm talking about is the majority of
"normal" users who do use xsrc.

This is all about good software hygiene, and in particular good
engineering practices for the overall NetBSD project, not for anyone who
strays slightly away as you're doing...   :-)

Note that I stray away quite a bit too as I don't use sendmail (and I
should probably not build postfix either as I would only ever use it
from pkgsrc anyway), and I only use a few of the many kernel ports, yet
I still advocate always checking out the whole thing as one big blob.

Things might be different in a private project that's managed by a whole
team which includes dedicated build and Q/A engineers, but that's
certainly not how a "public" project like NetBSD normally works.

There may be some tricks that might allow one to "ignore" certain parts
of a repository, but keep in mind that even in the CVS world good
software hygiene practices usually trump efficiency every time.

The only really effective trick though would be to use CVS modules
tricks to make "src" be an alias for "base", "sys", "x11", etc., but I
think that would require a lot of people to change how they do things
since it would likely require a slight but incompatible re-arrangement
in how the top-level src directory is structured.  (CVS has never had
any really good mechanisms for properly combining modules into
"super-modules", even though this lack has caused enormous frustration
for many CVS users over the years.)

Meanwhile it really would be best if src/x11 and xsrc came together,
which in the current structure is best done by putting xsrc in dist.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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