Management of ported 3rd-party software

[Josef Söntgen]

Hi Petr,

On 05/22/14 07:10, Petr Ovtchenkov wrote:
> […]
> Do you want to re-invent "git submodule"?

tl;dr No.


The new port mechanism merely unifies the already existing solution for
integrating 3rd-party software with Genode. That being said, the port
mechanism and git submodules both address different issues. The former
obtains 3rd-party software from varying sources that in some cases
happen to be git repositories and prepares the source code for utilization
within Genode or rather its build system. Git submodules on the other
extend the actual repository be embedding forgein repositories in it,
e.g. make them available in the actual repository.

This would work for obtaining 3rd-party software available in git
repositories only, obviously. By using this approach we would have to
treat these 3rd-party software sources in a different way from all other
3rd-party sources and we would im embedded them in the Genode repository.
Instead of creating diverging ways to obtain 3rd-party source code by
using a special feature of one kind of origin of 3rd-party source code
we treat them all equally and clearly dinstinguish between their origin.

If you really want to compare the new port mechanism in a loose way, it
is more or less similar to the one used by one or the other BSD port
framework.

Cheers
Josen