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Monday May 07, 2007

cr.opensolaris.org, a work in progress

A while back I wrote about online codereview. And Stephen has been hassling me to move my existing code review site, cr.grommit.com (hosting graciously provided by Steve Lau) over to the OpenSolaris.org infrastructure. So I have been slowly chipping away at all this, and now have some progress to report.

Gary was kind enough to provision me a zone in the OpenSolaris infrastructure. As such, I've started to bring up the new cr.opensolaris.org codereview site. Thus far, I have been working on getting mod_layout working so that we can decorate user supplied content with a little header and footer. This was a bit of a pain because the Apache bundled with Solaris is compiled with the Sun compilers, which are not installed on the datacenter systems. Only gcc is available (as it is in general on Solaris 10, under /usr/sfw/bin/gcc). So, I did the build elsewhere-- but I wonder what customers do when faced with this problem? I wonder if we could use our "compiler wrapper" technology (which we use when building the OS under both compilers) to help us to bridge this gap?

Once I got that squared away, I brought up Apache with some stubbed out content. Here is the beginning of the home page, and here is a sample code review with the decorations in place (that bar at the top is being dynamically inserted at page transmit time by mod_layout). What do you think? I'm pretty pleased about the way it looks, which was inspired by a similar "link bar" feature in gmail.

There is a bunch of stuff left to do: I'm going to change the account management around so that cr.opensolaris.org participates in the opensolaris.org SSH key management scheme. My working idea is that anyone with a contributor grant will be able to upload files. The rssh stuff needs to be moved over from grommit. Existing user data needs to move over. The main page needs an overhaul... and probably a bunch of other stuff I haven't thought of yet needs to be done. Hopefully in another couple of weeks it will be fully up and running.

(2007-05-07 19:12:55.0) Permalink Comments [4]
Tags: code codereview cr.opensolaris.org opensolaris review
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/dp/entry/cr_opensolaris_org_a_work

Comments:

You could just install the Sun compilers, they're free.

http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/downloads/index.jsp

Posted by Moazam Raja on May 07, 2007 at 11:06 PM PDT #

Ee, I think that Dan, being a Solaris kernel engineer @Sun, somehow already knows that. Anyways, to answer Dan's question about what customers do when faced with the compiling dilemma: they don't even think twice and go and install Sun Studio compilers! GCC is used only with clenched teeth, cursing and swearing, when there is absolutely no alternative (and usually in such a scenario the compile fails anyway, hopelessly broken, "Linux only"). I believe that by now, most of the (Open)Solaris folks have dedicated Sun Studio systems to compile on and with. At least I do, for both sparc and i86pc platforms. Also, friends don't let friends use GCC.

Posted by UX-admin on May 08, 2007 at 01:37 PM PDT #

I don't get it. If he knew that, why did he do the build elsewhere? Odd.

Posted by Moazam Raja on May 09, 2007 at 07:33 PM PDT #

I guess I just didn't want to go to the trouble of installing the compilers into the zone just to compile one extremely small component. Perhaps that just reflects my bias that things like 'apxs' should "just work" without having to add additional stuff to the base system.

Posted by Dan Price on May 10, 2007 at 12:19 AM PDT #