[KOS] Ports tree

[Lawrence S. <ljs...@us...>]

*cough* *cough* Is this thing on? Now that I have your attention…

As some of you might know (if you’ve looked at the roadmap page on the website), I’ve had this idea of having some sort of package manager for the kos-ports tree for a long while. Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve finally started working on just such a thing.

Now, I’m not going for a package manager in the traditional sense of apt or yum on Linux, but rather something much more akin to the FreeBSD ports collection. The goal of this is to make it exceptionally easy to “port” new libraries to the system and have them fit right in to the existing collection. Another goal here is to defer to the upstream packages wherever possible, rather than maintaining old crusty versions of the ports’ code in our git repositories (of course, many of the things in kos-ports don’t have an upstream as they were made directly for KOS, but that’s beside the point).

At the moment, it’s nowhere near perfect (it can’t handle package dependencies at the moment, and there are a few hiccups with some of the ports as they stand), but I did want to put it out there that I’m working on it (not that I think anyone else was doing such a thing).

With that out of the way, I wanted to bring up the subject of a few of the ports that currently exist in the kos-ports tree. Specifically, there’s two that I’m pretty sure I’m going to get rid of and one that I’m considering doing away with.

In the first category there, I’d like to get rid of libs3m and lwIP entirely from the kos-ports tree. libs3m doesn’t look like it’s worked in a long while (the code that actually gets turned into libs3m looks like it’s just a broken/old version of the snd_sfx_* code), so I don’t really think there’s going to be any objection there. lwIP, I’d like to get rid of because it has been completely superseded by the internal network stack. I know there are still a few performance related issues in the internal stack, but keeping lwIP around doesn’t really change that. So, if there aren’t any objections, I’m going to just do away with those two ports as I continue working on the new port manager. They’ll both continue to exist in the Git repositories they already have set up on the sourceforge page, I’m just planning on essentially acting like they don’t exist from now on. ;-)

In the second category, I was wondering if anyone uses liboggvorbisplay over libtremor these days? libtremor has kinda been the “suggested” Vorbis library in KOS for a while, so I’m just wondering if it’s even worthwhile to keep liboggvorbisplay around. Any comments from anyone on that subject?

I’ve rambled enough at this point, so I’ll cut this off here for now. Hopefully, I’ll have more good news on the new port management stuff very soon. :)

- Lawrence