[M3devel] [M3commit] log messages for committed changes

[Jay]

I was thinking of starting an email thread on this.
 
 
I believe the reasons to make things standalone are:
 
  - unshipped built-global tools run during the build, such as m3bundle, stub generators, PklFonts, etc. 
    I think these could be addressed but it'd take some work.
 
 
  - "Tony's convenience", still being discussed.
    A think this was a stronger case prior to -rpath where having "separate runnable backups"
    was more difficult. Or perhaps still since -rpath isn't yet everywhere, AMD64_DARWIN in particular.
    Personally when I revert to a backup I copy it back to the real place, sometimes
    with an entire package store,
    but it is reasonable to not have to do that, and even reasonable to reduce it to one file
    instead of roughly three in two directories.
    This would really only apple to cm3 and m3cgcat. For it to include m3cggen would
    definitely be surprising.
    It is also "nice to have" cm3 statically linked because when cross building to a new
    platform, you don't have to get shared libraries working before running cm3. But
    you could toggle that for this scenario.
 
    I had thought there was also a requirement around bootstrapping from an older
    build, where old cm3 can't build new m3core/libm3, but I don't see that now.
 
  - inability on some platforms to ship in use files, could be worked around, but
    partly related to previous, and more than that; in particular cm3 shouldn't ship
    m3core.so/libm3.so that it uses, if you intend to run that cm3 again
 
 
  - possibly so they can be redistributed with fewer files
    This is the typical reason in the larger world for reducing dynamic linking, 
      as well to be independent of changes to those files.
    But I don't think "we" intend that to happen for "our" stuff.
     And I think we intend for now to always ship everything together,
     so versioning and compatibility can be ignored. I think.
    There are still a few sprinkled standalones, like in games.
      Which is why I was going to start email.
    If someone really wanted to copy solitaire around without installing its dependencies,
    rebuild it from source?
 
 
  - cminstall, because it runs so early 
    Though this could be addressed via -rpath = $ORIGIN and putting
    the .so files it needs next to it, and not duplicating them.
 
 
 The reason to make things not standalone is several efficiency gains.
 You share the code in memory, you share it on disk, you don't copy it around
 as many times, locally or over the network. The savings are generally pretty large.
 
 
  - Jay


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> Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:24:47 -0400
> From: rcolebur at scires.com
> To: m3commit at elegosoft.com; m3devel at elegosoft.com
> Subject: [M3commit] log messages for committed changes
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> Hey, I've seen several of these type messages (see below). My question is "WHY"? Just to state that it doesn't need to be standalone begs the question why was it made standalone in the first place and what is the reason why it no longer needs to be that way.
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> Maybe this is part of a larger rant on my part, but when folks commit changes, I would encourage everyone to provide some rationale and detail in the log message.
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> There are few people like Olaf and Tony that have enough perspective with the whole system to be able to look at the details of what was changed and try to reverse something that goes against core principals or that will cause problems elsewhere. For the rest of us, and for documentation of the system evolution, it is important that the log messages be as detailed as possible, at least to give the rationale why a change is being made. I know documentation is not glamorous and doesn't directly affect the code, but it is nonetheless important, and if done well can be a real benefit.
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> Thanks for listening. I'll step down off my soapbox now.
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> Regards,
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> Randy Coleburn
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>>>> Jay Krell 6/26/2009 10:12 AM>>>
> CVSROOT:/usr/cvs
> Changes by:jkrell at birch.09/06/26 10:12:42
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> Modified files:
> cm3/m3-sys/m3cgcat/src/: m3makefile
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> Log message:
> This doesn't need to be standalone.
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