[Xorp-users] Call for feedback/volunteers: Build system, platform tier support.

Bruce Simpson bms at incunabulum.net
Mon Jul 13 12:50:52 PDT 2009


Hi all,

I'd like to hear from people who have an interest in maintaining XORP on 
specific platforms; please contact me if your distribution / OS isn't 
listed below, and let me know if you're interested in platform 
maintainership.

The aim is to remove GNU Autotools completely from the tree, before 
Boost, ASIO and Thrift are introduced, to support cross-language use of 
the XORP core, in a clean, consistent and maintainable way.

This is going to be a majorly disruptive change. It is likely that we 
are going to have to focus on 3 or 4 core distributions, for the 
community branch, with the resources we have. [1]

At the moment, my 'core distro' list boils down to:-
 * Ubuntu 9.04 / Linux
 * Fedora 10 / Linux
 * FreeBSD 7.2/8.0
 * OpenSolaris 2009.06  [2]

Limiting ourselves to a handful of key distributions, allows more intent 
focus on making sure the most up-to-date, and feature complete, versions 
of community XORP are available on those platforms. If your platform is 
not listed, please let us know.

The work on converting XORP's use of GNU Autotools to SCons is nearing 
completion. Most of the Autoconf tests have been converted to their 
SCons/Python equivalents; the speed and conciseness are a vast improvement.

It's likely, but not for sure, that JT at XORP may be able to support 
NetBSD. XORP, Inc. may be using other Linux targets for internal 
development, but I cannot comment further at this time.

I have the source building, without regression tests, using SCons, on 
both FreeBSD 7.2 and Linux 2.6.27 (Gentoo Linux 2008.0). [3]
My outstanding tasks for that drop are as follows:
 * get cross-builds working;
 * restore static library builds (SCons is doing shared libraries for 
most targets);
 * get the regression tests building again. [4]

Windows support isn't on the radar, until someone comes forward to 
support it, but I don't plan on breaking the portability that is already 
there -- except where bulldozing is really needed.

best regards,
BMS

[1] I am also considering moving docs/ into a separate SVN branch, as 
it's huge, and we can probably get away with tag slippage there when 
rolling a community release.

[2] I've not ported the OpenSolaris tests yet. Can anyone who's using 
this platform suggest a good VMDK/VDI image for VirtualBox, which has 
the SFU gcc toolchain?

[3] There is an issue with the IPTables headers, however, under Gentoo 
2008.0 where gcc 4.1.2 complains about arithmetic on void * pointers. 
This is likely due to bit-rotted kernel headers.

[4] There is an internal Buildbot at XORP, Inc. and I need to get some 
feedback from JT (who is currently on holiday) about how feasible it 
will be to maintain build coverage with the diverse range of platforms 
that XORP has been able to support to date, with the internal 
engineering resources.



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