[openfabrics-ewg] On vacation on Sep-13 till 12-Oct

[Jeff Squyres]

On 9/18/06 11:40 AM, "Michael S. Tsirkin" <mst at mellanox.co.il> wrote:

> Well, here's to hope that autoconf/automake can be fixed to support
> building libraries without installing dependencies first.

Doesn't it seem odd that among all the systems and platforms that OMPI
supports, and -- a much larger set -- all the systems that Autoconf,
Automake, and Libtool support, OFED is the only package with a problem?  It
seems somewhat weird that the only package with the problem is the one that
is asking others to change to fit its model -- a model for which there is at
least one alternative solution (chroot).

As you cited, building as root is not attractive, but you already have to
have root access to install OFED -- so it doesn't seem like too much of a
stretch to have root access to build, especially given that:

1. the build is trying to create a series of inter-dependent packages
without modifying the currently-running system
2. the build is *not* using the normal build model that the individual
sub-packages were designed for (i.e., all the patches to each package).

>From a software engineering perspective, isn't it better to not modify all
the sub-packages, but rather do some setup before the build so that the
sub-packages can be built as they were designed?  Indeed, exactly some of
these workarounds and changes to adapt the sub-packages to this build model
have been responsible for some of the bugs in OFED.

-- 
Jeff Squyres
Server Virtualization Business Unit
Cisco Systems