[openib-general] Problem with userspace tree structure

[Roland Dreier]

    shaharf> As a matter of fact, this is similar to other tools
    shaharf> packages that have many tools under one roof (most tool
    shaharf> chains). I am not sure http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/ is a
    shaharf> good example for us - it contains hundreds of related and
    shaharf> non related projects that there is really no sense to
    shaharf> build them all. We are not there. What we have now is a
    shaharf> set of tools. If or when the number of usermode project
    shaharf> will grow, and there will be sets of tools that dedicated
    shaharf> to some environment or task, I would separate the
    shaharf> usermode root to some sub-trees such as switch, host,
    shaharf> MPI, ... Right now it is unnecasarily overhead.

I think gnome is a pretty good parallel, because the contents of
userspace/ are really separate projects, with different sets of
developers and different maintainers.  Having one main makefile is
confusing for users and packagers, and the current scheme is also
error prone, since it's hard to maintain correct cross-package
dependencies (for example, touch include/common.h, run make, and watch
binaries that depend on it such as mad_test fail to get rebuilt).

 - Roland