[ntp:hackers] how to update docs, add keywords, add opts, etc.

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Sat Aug 10 02:59:06 UTC 2013


I think the answer to many of your questions is just-type-make.  It should do 
the right thing.  If not, we should fix it.  [I assume Harlan will correct me 
if I'm wrong.]

Of course, before you can do that you have to run configure.   Configure will 
work out of a tar file, but if you are using BK, you need to run bootstrap 
first.

There is actually another step before that.  The parser for ntp.conf gets 
compiled someplace and the output of that step is fed into BK as source.  
There may be other files treated this way.  I think the idea is to not 
require tools (bison) on all systems where people might be running BK.

There is a layer of stuff in the Makefiles that tries to avoid doing 
unnecessary work.  The one I saw the other day made a new version of xxx and 
compared it to the old version after removing both the time-stamp lines in 
both files.  If there was no change (except the time stamps), it didn't 
update the old version of xxx.

If it were up to me, I think I would remove all that stuff.  Computers are 
fast enough now that it's not a serious problem to do a few extra compiles.  
I think simplifying the Makefiles and build process would be a good trade.  
[For reference, it's 2-5 minutes to do a configure and make.  That's using a 
local disk on a PC.  I'll get solid numbers if anybody wants.]

------------

Of course, you have to know what to edit.  Harlan's message covered much of 
that, but it would be nice to collect all that knowledge in one place.

Many years ago, I remember when I found the memo describing the flow of our 
CAD system.  Wow, all of a sudden a whole bunch of stuff made sense.  A 
similar memo/web page/README/whatever for the NTP world would be a big help.  
I'll be glad to help, but I don't know a lot of the details.

---------

brian.utterback at oracle.com said:
> Oh, and one last thing. Once I get everything up to data, is there a
> procedure for how to create a distribution tarball from the updated  repo? I
> would like to take the tarball and test it on my target systems. 

If you just want to test your new code on several systems rather than make 
sure that you can build a tarball that will work, you can just get the whole 
directory to the other machine any way you like.  I use rsync.  NFS works too.

If you are using NFS, you have to make sure that various machines don't 
trample on eachother.  The Makefiles are setup to support that.  I call it 
building-off-to-the-side.  There may be a buzzword, but I don't know it.

The basic idea is:
  cd your-ntp-dir
  mkdir <hostname>
  cd <hostname>
  ../configure <args>
  make

The compiler reaches back to the source directory get the input files but all 
the output gets left in <hostname>.  You can blow away that whole directory 
any time you want.

If you are editing things like the parser for config files (ntp_parser.y), 
the output gets left back in the source directory.  bk status -v will find it.

If you are testing on multiple machines, it's fairly easy to put most of the 
work into scripts.  I started with one that does a bk pull and bootstrap so I 
don't forget the bootstrap step.  I keep the per-machine configuration info 
in configure.<hostname>, so the configure step above becomes 
../configure.<hostname>, and I have a do-local-build script that does all the 
above and tee-s the output off to config.log and make.log



-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.





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