earle@POSEUR.JPL.NASA.GOV (Greg Earle - Sun JPL on-site Software Support) (07/28/90)
In xpert, Peter Morreale <morreale@bierstadt.SCD.UCAR.EDU> wrote: >Several kind folks have pointed me to the scripts included in the distribution >which can deal with the problem of maintaining X for different >platforms from a single source tree. For those of you running SunOS 4.1, I heartily recommend using the new TFS (Translucent File System) for this purpose. There are times when I think that TFS was made just to do this, even though I really know it was originally developed to support our NSE (Network Software Environment) product. You can leave a virgin source distribution on some machine, and for other machines of other architectures, you can do a TFS mount of another directory onto an NFS mount of the virgin source tree. This way, the source tree never gets touched, you don't create some `lndir' tree of a quadzillion symbolic links, and when you do (e.g.) `cd mit/util/patch ; Configure ; make', the net result is that it *looks* for all intents and purposes as if it was done right in that directory (`ls' yields all the source, .o's and the `patch' binary, correct for your current machine's architecture, all appearing in the same place), yet the `real' resting place of the created files (the .o's and the executable, etc.) is somewhere else on your local disk drive (i.e., under the tree rooted at the directory you TFS mount over the NFS mounted vanilla source tree). It even has the extra added bonus of making the compilations et al. *local*, i.e. the .o's and executable are written to the local disk, just like in the case of a `lndir' tree, and as opposed to the case where you simply brute-force NFS mount the tree and do your compiles in the NFS mount (thus forcing NFS writes/reads for all those .o's and executables). The TFS is a wonderful tool and new addition to SunOS 4.1 (it comes with the O/S - it is not separate; simply enable `options TFS' in your kernel config file), and it was tailor-made for just this type of situation. Take advantage of it!! -- - Greg Earle | "This is Kraft. It uses a blue box. Sun Los Angeles | This is Stouffer's. It uses red. JPL on-site Software Support | The choice is yours." earle@poseur.JPL.NASA.GOV | Pretty damn convincing argument, eh?