[OpenIndiana-discuss] [discuss] Re: [developer] Illumos/OI development system installation

Sat Apr 10 17:17:21 UTC 2021

 Thanks for the response. I use OI as my internet access system, so X11 is essential.

What is a "well provisioned machine"? How many cores, how much DRAM and disk? Ten years ago a VM for building was a non-starter. What does it take for that?

When I got my first Z400, I configured my Ultra 20 to build Illumos/OI. It took about a week of work tracking down the correct details, but I eventually got it to complete the build. But I couldn't find any information about how to boot it. When I asked on the dev lists I got no response at all. That left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Since then "we're just a handful of developers" has become a popular refrain on oi-discuss. The *only* viable solution is to reduce the barriers to contributing so that the sole barrier is quality of work. Hence my suggestion.

I want to be able to run a fully capable build system as my daily driver so that if I encounter a bug, I can fix it and send the fix for review and incorporation. Aside from the format(1m) issues, the beadm(1m) man page output for "beadm list" does not match the actual output. I see stuff like this all the time. Rather than file a bug report I'd like to submit a patch file and a brief explanation.

I don't know how much of an OI user community is left. Many familiar names have not posted in a very long time.

I recently tried FreeBSD which doesn't supply a windowing system. So I went to ports and attempted to build X11. It fell over part way through because a program, "xmlto" IIRC, was missing and despite autotools checking for it, one of the Makefiles was not generated correctly. I can fix it, but I didn't get wildly enthusiastic despite having bought the 2nd ed of McKusick et al which *is* a good read as always has been the case with his books.

I tried a number of FreeBSD distros which include X11 a few years ago, but was quite unimpressed, mostly because of installation issues.

Reg
     On Saturday, April 10, 2021, 10:05:42 AM CDT, Dan McDonald <danmcd at joyent.com> wrote:  

 On Apr 10, 2021, at 10:34 AM, Reginald Beardsley via illumos-developer <developer at lists.illumos.org> wrote:
> 
> I should like to suggest that providing a turnkey development  installation that would permit someone like me to compile format(1m)  and fix the SEGV faults would go a long way towards increasing the number of people supporting OI and Illumos.

I'm sorry for missing this.  $DAYJOB (which for me is distro SmartOS and more) can be a bit overwhelming.

Unless you need a native windowing environment, I'd HIGHLY recommend installing OmniOS on a well-provisioned machine or VM, and installing the "illumos-tools" metapackage, which SHOULD bring in everything you need to build illumos-omnios or illumos-gate. I've not used OI in years, but I suspect they might have illumos-tools or some moral equivalent in their distro as well.  And if you want a native windowing environment OI is your best bet.

Also, since you wish to concentrate on one particular binary, I have an older (and probably needs updating) blog post on how to do that as well.

Lemme comb here... and please remember most of these posts are years old:

Here's a post on the illumos-tools metapackage, which has stale links but does contain what should still work as far as building the whole gate in a hurry:

        https://kebe.com/blog/?p=467

And here's a post on "developing small" from WAY back, which also probably needs updating (and honestly "ws" and "bldenv" need to just combine into one tool), but will help you concentrate on "format" and not have to build the whole gate every time:

        https://kebe.com/blog/?p=449

I'd recommend:

1.) Using OmniOS or OI.

2.) Clone-and-build all of illumos-gate.

3.) Once built, use "ws" or "bldenv /opt/onbld/env/...", enter the gate, and edit usr/src/cmd/format/... and utter "dmake" in that directory every time you change things to get quick results.

Hope this helps,
Dan

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