Re: OT: How do people set up long term development

["David O'Brien" <obrien at FreeBSD dot org>]

On Wed, May 28, 2003 at 11:02:11AM -0400, Michael Meissner wrote:
> I am wondering how people outside of Red Hat do long term development of
> compiler tools when you can't check the machine specific sources into the FSF
> repository until the NDA on the machine has been lifted?  The intention is that
> when the chipset I am developing the GNU toolchain for is formally announced, I
> will submit the files to the FSF for consideration of inclusion in the
> releases, and non-machine specific changes that I make will be contributed as
> they are written.
> 
> I can see three different development models:
> 
> 1) Create my own CVS repository of a checked out releases, and check the files
>    into there.  Every so often, I will do a merge from the FSF sources to my
>    own repository.  This is how we did development at OSF, Cygnus, and Red Hat.

This is how the FreeBSD's does it.  However, you didn't mention the very
important deatail of doing *vendor branch* imports into your private CVS
tree.  Perododically, take a GCC snapshot, and import it again onto the
*vendor branch*.  CVS will give you instructions on how to use "-j -j" to
merge the changes onto your mainline development branch.

Others do the same thing, but with Perforce over CVS.  Perforce's vastly
superior branching and merging abilities make doing this easier than it
is with CVS.

> 3) I could imagine an alternative to #1 of downloading the rcs files from the
>    repository to use as a starting base, instead of creating the files from
>    scratch.  This may make the eventual merge easier, but intermediate merges
>    may be more difficult.

You can also CVSup the GCC CVS repository (,v files); and follow the
instructions at http://www.cvsup.org/faq.html#canilocal for maintaining
your own local branch.  You would use CVS's -j merging to put FSF GCC
changes onto your local, private branch.

-- 
-- David  (obrien@FreeBSD.org)