Re: Pretty please: no more lower-case macros !!!

[Adrian Bocaniciu <a.bocaniciu@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:

>     Which macros are you talking about, specifically?
>     I am not particularly fond of #define macros either but as far as I
>     know we have not added anything non-standard visible to userland.  If we


   At line 261 of /usr/include/net/route.h you have:

#define        sa_dst        rti_info[RTAX_DST]

and other seven similar macro definitions.

	These macros have broken net/quagga and net/zebra by the mechanism 
described in my initial message of this thread and they might also break 
many other packages.


>     DragonFly is going to break a lot of FreeBSD ports, period.  DragonFly
>     is not FreeBSD.  There will be a focus on the ports/packaging system 
>     later on, but that isn't the focus right now.


	You are right and what I like about your project is that you are not 
afraid to make real changes.  Nevertheless, you must keep in mind that 
you cannot describe DragonFly as anything near production-ready while a 
large number of essential ports are broken.

	I have around one hundred FreeBSD production computers, but with all my 
goodwill I could not find enough of the ports that I need to be working 
at this time so I could not switch even one of the servers to DF.

	As other people have already said, the greatest FreeBSD asset is the 
huge ports collection.  I do not see any reason to break the ports 
without a serious motivation.  These macros could have been easily 
avoided and for the large deletions that have been done in many 
networking headers a more gradual strategy could be adopted.

	For example, you could put the items scheduled for deletion from the 
standard headers under conditional compilation and allow for some 
limited time the ports to be built with or without them and announce 
some roadmap for the deprecated features so whoever is interested in the 
ports will be able to make the required changes before those features 
are removed from DF.

	As it is now, I only see that a lot of things have been deleted from 
the standard headers, but I know neither what other things are planned 
to be deleted nor what is supposed to replace the deleted items, so I 
cannot help in making the appropriate changes in the ports.

	Maybe if you could release some documents about your plans regarding 
the userland interfaces, it would enable more people to contribute to 
restoring the ports collection to a working status.

	Best regards !