Re: Apple's Darwin commitment

On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:13:28PM -0700, Kevin Van Vechten wrote:
> I think you've got it completely backwards.
> 
[snip]
> 
> 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.
> 
[snip]

	I've found that darwinbuild and the cleanup work have made
it so that its possible to actually do useful work on getting
OpenDarwin to build, rather than spending what few cycles are
available just getting a build environment working.  
	I know several (talented) people who were very excited
about getting into the darwin and helping squash bugs until they
had spent all of their excitement (and then some) in getting the
build environment working.  Now its possible to kick off a build
of a project (or the whole of OpenDarwin), come back to it later
and get directly into fixing the problem.  Kicking off a build
takes all of 15 minutes or so if you *haven't* setup darwinbuild
yet, and all of one command if you have.  This lets me focus
on the problems individual projects have and fix those bugs,
no hassles at all.  This is *huge* (at least to me).


		-eric