JCjclulow·Jan 30, 2024
> sprinkling LD_LIBRARY_PATHs here and there and then removing undocumented dot files here and there
I obviously don't have any context about the issues you were facing at the time, and I can't really figure it out based on the advice you ostensibly received. I'm definitely sorry if we have lead you astray in the past, but those are not workarounds I would encourage people to use today. If there's some aspect of the build process that requires workarounds like you're describing, it's definitely a bug and we'll fix it when we're made aware as best we can.
As for the rest of it, I think you're putting the cart before the horse on some level. An operating system is a large and complex thing to work on, regardless of whether it's built with make or ninja or bazel or whatever other build tool.
The Rust toolchain is another similarly complex
Read the rest
body of software, which also has a large and at times inscrutable build process. I know because I have personally contributed to it, and had to figure out how to get it to work. Rust obviously has more active contributors than illumos, but it also has vastly more active _users_ -- it is a body of software that has broad applicability to many people and the work they do.
For illumos to continue to succeed as an actively maintained project, what we need to do is continue to inspire _users_ to want to use it. Nobody wants to work on an operating system they don't personally need to use at all. We draw contributions today from a mixture of community driven distributions making fixes or adding features, and by people employed by companies like Oxide who have a vested economic interest in the deployment of the software.
None of this is to say that we're perfect, or that we're not trying to improve things. Just that we're trying to put build system improvements in the proper context amongst all the other work there is to do with our limited resources. It's probably more important that we have support for new Intel client NICs like you would find in a modern desktop system, for example, than it is that we replace make. It's important that we continue to add system calls and libc facilities that other platforms have adopted in order to ease software porting. It's important that we continue to maintain modern JDKs and Python and Go and Rust and C/C++ compilers. It's important that we keep up with security issues and the endless stream of mitigations imposed by the sieve-like nature of speculative CPUs.
There's actually quite a lot of stuff going on for us all the time, and we do still find time to improve the build system. If you have more specifics in mind, that's fantastic and we'd love to here about them concretely! I would encourage you to channel your enthusiasm into writing an illumos project discussion (IPD) describing the issues you see and the work you'd propose to sort them out! You can see some examples of existing IPDs at https://github.com/illumos/ipd
And as ever, if you hit issues in the build as it stands, please file bugs! We can't fix things we haven't heard about.
Cheers.