Return-Path: paula Return-Path: Received: from spiff.cygnus.com by cygnus.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA18087; Thu, 18 Jun 92 07:45:16 PDT Date: Thu, 18 Jun 92 07:45:16 PDT From: paula (Paula Vancini) Message-Id: <9206181445.AA18087@cygnus.com> Received: by spiff.cygnus.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA01876; Thu, 18 Jun 92 07:45:15 PDT To: engnews-distrib Subject: Inside Cygnus Engineering - June 1992 Reply-To: paula@cygnus.com Organization: Cygnus Support, Palo Alto CA; Phone +1 415 322 3811 INSIDE CYGNUS ENGINEERING June 1992 --------------------------------------------------------------------- Inside Cygnus Engineering (ICE) is published monthly for customers of Cygnus Support. Our objective is to provide a relevant but informal summary of news and ongoing activities. Please send all comments, suggestions, and subscription requests to engnews@cygnus.com. PRODUCTS AND RELEASES -------------------- 1. Progressive Update The latest Progressive release was made at the end of May. It provides native development support for 5 host platforms, Sun 3, Sun 4, DECStation, SGI-Iris, and the IBM RS6000. A separate release of emacs 18.58 for the same hosts was also made at the same time. These are tagged the 920529 comp-tools and emacs releases respectively. We are currently ironing out packaging issues before shipment, now expected to start June 26. As we had indicated in the last issue of ICE, making this progressive release has been more difficult than we expected, and will have ramifications on the succeeding progressive release schedules. What were our challenges in making this release in the last six weeks? 1. Making libg++ work "out of the box", especially for the new hosts that were added (SGI-Iris and RS6000) mentioned in section 3 below. 2. The addition of the RS6000 platform. This platform is relatively new for us, and quite different from the others. Despite much work in the last six months and help from the Advanced Workstations Division of IBM, getting a fairly stable release successfully out the door was touch and go up to the last minute. 3. Maintaining a merged source tree. The Free software development process differs from other typical software lifecycles in two pertinent ways: it moves more quickly, and the tradition is to keep the different ports merged in a single source tree rather than to have a base platform and freestanding ports. Making a tree that can be configured and built out of the box for a number of different platforms, and that is not too far behind the current state of the software, is proving to be a tough (but not intractable) technical and logistical problem. 4. Tools and infrastructure. Likewise, we are continuing to put significant effort into building the tools and processes that will build and verify the releases from our source trees. New to this Progressive release is a simple procedure for testing the tape-building effort and installation process. What about new schedules? Our next multiplatform progressive release will be of the cross development toolchain. The original plan called for an end-of-June release for the Motorola 68k, Intel i960, and AMD 29k target platforms. Because of the difficulties we have encountered with building a single tree and tools for multiple platforms, we have decided to scale back and focus on the 68k first. This is now targeted to go into beta in early July. The other two target platforms will be added 4-6 weeks later. Each target will have at least the Sun 4 as the cross development host. Other hosts will be provided as part of the progressive release according to customer and market demand. Hosts outside of the progressive release will continue to be provided as part of our support agreements. Our current progressive plans are as follows: Date Platform -------------------------------------------------------------- June Native: Sun 3, Sun 4, DECstation, IBM RS6000, SGI-Iris July Native: Solaris 2.0 (sparc) Target: 68k August Target: i960, 29k September Native: SCO-Unix Host: HP700, DOS Target: i386/486 -------------------------------------------------------------- How much should you count on the schedules you read about in ICE? Schedules are truly one of the "inside" parts of Inside Cygnus Engineering. We would like you to believe that these are our current best estimates. They are sometimes aggressive, but they are the goals that we have set for ourselves and we all strive to meet them. 2. Solaris 2.0 Update Sun seems on track to ship Solaris 2.0 by the end of June, and we are hard at work to make sure that gcc will be there two weeks thereafter. The software is now running at several beta sites. In terms of in-house testing, gcc has been run through the wendy suite, and we are running the old SPARC ABI compliance test suite. We will also run it through the SPARC Compliance Test 2.0 suite when that becomes available in the fall. We continue to get positive press. Recent mentions include those in SunFLASH v40#19 and v41#14, the I/Opener Column in March's SunExpert, the March and June issues of SunWorld, and Open Systems Today on April 13 and April 27. In addition, Dave Taylor of SunWorld is planning to review the product as part of his article on tools available with Solaris 2.0 at FCS. The total dollar commitment to our Solaris 2.0 compiler effort is now approximately $80,000. This is still short of our desired target so we continue to look for more supporters. As you know, early adopters will get a >50% discount for a year of support for five users. So if you know anyone who could use an excellent free compiler for Solaris 2, please urge them to sign up. 3. libg++ and binutils The following releases to the net have been made. * libg++ 2.1 The C++ library has recently undergone major changes. The main objective of the new release is to make it work "out of the box" on as many hosts as is possible. This is accomplished by making it be able to configure itself automatically according to the characteristics of the local host. There have also been numerous small enhancements and bug-fixes, most notably in the improved reliability in the iostream facility. * binutils 1.98 The new release of the binary utilities (ld, nm, ar, etc) is imminent. It is based on the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library, which provides an interface to multiple object file formats. Note that although we now separate the linker from the rest of the binutils, for the purposes of the net release, it is as part of binutils. Recent work on binutils (available in binutils-1.98) includes relaxation in the linker (on selected targets), compatibility with MRI development tools, some reduction in the space needed by the linker, some improved backends, support for the AMD SA 29200, and a new configuration scheme for ld based on shell scripts (to reduce duplication between minor variants of the same object format). Shared libraries support, however, remains unsupported. SUPPORT ACTIVITIES ------------------- In addition to new developments, a significant part of our engineering resources is devoted to answering questions, fixing problems in the GNU software, and providing a range of support services to our customers. 1. Guide to Cygnus Support Services We have tried to keep you informed of our engineering and support activities with ICE. Some of the articles, such as the details of a new GDB release, are of transient interest. Others, like the one on send_pr and our PRMS system, describe part of what we offer in general to our customers. We are now beginning to collate these latter articles and other discussions about what we offer into a comprehensive document, the Guide to Cygnus Support Services. Some of the typical topics are listed below. - What is a progressive release? How is it related to "devo" or "shrink"? - What is a "core" contract? What is a "leveraged" one, or a "single"? What services do we provide for each? - What happens when you send in a problem report to Cygnus? - What happens (or ought to happen) when you become our customer? - How do you escalate a problem? - What else can Cygnus help you with? We would like your inputs as to what else you would like to see addressed in this Guide. We are also looking for "beta" reviewers in the August 1 timeframe. Please send mail to engnews@cygnus.com if you have specific suggestions and/or if you would like to be a reviewer. 2. Software Status Update Open problem reports as of June 15: 236 New reports since May 4: 124 Reports closed since May 4: 60 OTHER ITEMS ----------- We value your inputs, and would like to ask for your response to the following questions (to engnews@cygnus.com). We will publish summaries of answers in the following issue. 1. Do you rely solely on the schedules in published in ICE for your planning purposes? 2. What would be the most effective way for us to communicate schedule changes to you? --------------------------------------------------------------------- Cygnus Support 814 University Avenue One Kendall Square Palo Alto, CA 94301 Cambridge, MA 02139 +1 415 322 3811 voice +1 617 494 1040 voice +1 415 322 3270 fax +1 617 494 1325 fax