[40] in DCNS Development
Re: Code handoff
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Tom Coppeto)
Thu Jun 27 08:59:38 1991
To: basch@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-73@MIT.EDU, developers@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 91 08:58:50 EDT
From: Tom Coppeto <tom@MIT.EDU>
In looking again at peter's message a couple of weeks ago, I guess I
didn't realize what a change to the decstation platform would mean.
I'm not concerned about dxpsview or @sys, but the compatibility for
developers external to athena to get some work done and not see this
as another gratuitous change.
I'm hoping that any re-organization of the athena installation would
solicit broad input. There are a number of us here and outside of mit
who have had kong and bitter experiences in dealing with the source
tree and trying to implement a layering of the athena environment in a
sane manner who may have some opinions about this.
In short, I would like to see a blueprint designed to what the source
tree should look like (so it builds!), where programs should live, and
what the dependenices are. This blueprint should allow for the entire
spectrum of installations from an athena operations maintained machine
to a 'mount a file system and go' athena player. There would be no
reason for such a blueprint to vary across unix machines for the
strict mitnet, athena, and third party software. Not only would it
provide for some sanity across platforms, but it would help make a
port to a new platform, at least a unix one for starters, no big
thing.
I'm very glad to see some signs of progress and thought about these
sorts of things, but it's certainly about time where we as a
development organization begin to make some serious effort in the
designing and planning stages of such a package.
- Tom
