Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

I think you've got it completely backwards.

On Sep 13, 2005, at 6:46 PM, Markus Hitter wrote:


> Am 14.09.2005 um 01:56 schrieb Jordan K. Hubbard:
>
>
>> Darwin is released solely as a collection of reference bits [...]
>>
>
> here's clearly some erosion going on.
>
> In the Mac OS X 10.0/10.1 days, Darwin was, updated in CVS  
> regularly. One could watch source code being developed in small  
> changes, compile the stuff weekly, etc ...
>

I disagree somewhat.  Yes, you could see incremental changes, but  
actually I found the sources at that time to be far less useful,  
since it wasn't clear which bits had actually made it into a  
release.  There was never a standard nomenclature for CVS tags across  
projects, and the tags that made it into the release were never  
publicly shown.

By the time I had come to Apple, CVS was already offline, but I made  
it a priority to get source snapshots out promptly with every  
release, organized by release.  Although this doesn't convey the  
"warm fuzzy feeling" of CVS, I think it's more useful because at  
least you know which bits correspond to which release.

Can you name anyone outside Apple who built a full darwin release  
during this time?  I think Rob did.


> With 10.2 and 10.3, public source were updated for official Mac OS  
> X releases only. If something stopped working between releases, you  
> had to wade trough a huuuge patch. But still, a standalone OS could  
> be compiled successfully, resulting in more than one OpenDarwin  
> release.
>

Are you speaking from experience?  Did you compile a standalone OS?   
I know Felix, Shantonu, Rob, Dave and I compiled releases in this  
timeframe...


> With 10.4, the do-it-yourself OS is obviously gone. According to  
> your post, one can peek into all those source files, one can try to  
> compile a project or two and one can hope this works on a OS X  
> installation. The possibility to run own modifications on a self- 
> built OS (where you have control over everything, not just the  
> Apple-provided excerpts) is a thing of the past.
>

I totally disagree.  Every source tarball and patch that I used to  
build Darwin 8.0.1 has been published.  Yes, there are some  
components of Darwin 8.0.1 that are only available outside Apple in  
binary form, but that has always been the case with every previous  
Darwin release.

Shantonu and I have been working on DarwinBuild which is a much more  
robust build environment for Darwin than was ever available for  
Darwin 6.x or 7.x.  In many, many ways the sources to Darwin 8 are  
cleaner than previous sources.  A lot of effort was invested in  
cleaning up bad dependencies and fixing other Darwin bugs in Tiger,  
before it was released.

For the past couple weeks there have been several volunteers  
completing near-world builds of Darwin almost nightly.  If you're  
interested in the recent progress, check out <http:// 
release.opendarwin.org/Leimy-Logs4/>.  As far as I know, this is the  
biggest coordinated darwin building activity that has ever happened.


> Strong hints to Apple's intention of Darwin being a standalone OS  
> are those Installer CD releases. The most odd and most recent one  
> being Darwin 8.0.1. What's the purpose of this release if it can't  
> be rebuilt from "Darwin" sources released at the same time?
>

The point is to verify that sources actually can be compiled into  
something meaningful.  They can be--Darwin 8.0.1 was released.

- Kevin

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