[Xorp-users] SCons prerequisites for Linux targets

Bruce Simpson bms at incunabulum.net
Sat Jul 18 08:33:38 PDT 2009


Ben Greear wrote:
> Sounds good.  Hope you have better luck keeping spammers out of your 
> wiki than we did :P

    I think it's reasonable that people need to sign up, in order to 
contribute to a Wiki. Captcha-like systems can only go so far. I'd 
rather we didn't have to vet people who just wander in wanting to 
contribute their own support information. I'm surprised that XORP does 
not already have an independent Wiki.

    We are still waiting for the legal go-ahead to deploy the community 
code on SourceForge.

    I can't apologise enough for this, this is pretty much out of my 
hands at the moment. I have suggested Google Code as an alternative 
venue, which is possibly more viable given the constraints we're under 
here for a community release.

    SourceForge is in a period of change itself at the moment. Whilst I 
don't like the idea of putting all our eggs in the Google basket -- and 
there are good arguments on both sides -- SourceForge have withdrawn 
their Wiki service, Google Code have not.

>
> A simple README_BUILD.txt would probably suffice as well.

    The thing is, whilst it's all well and good shipping BUILD_NOTES in 
the release tarballs as we already do, we probably need to move to a 
more fluid model. The information in those files gets outdated easily, 
and XORP has been shipping them around year after year.

    Shipping community releases is time consuming, and when the 
engineering resource isn't there, it's difficult to pull off without 
serious personal commitment on the part of the original instigators, and 
that doesn't come without its own costs. It is always best to have the 
host organisation directly involved.

    One approach, which seems to work well in one local software company 
I'm in the loop with, is to designate Friday afternoon as 'open source 
time', and this is something will be recommending to XORP, Inc. The 
community branch is, after all, pretty much an essential sales 
opportunity, that can't be ignored.

thanks,
BMS



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