Bounding the target platforms

[Eric S. Raymond]

Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>:
> 
> esr at thyrsus.com said:
> > So let's drop back to two questions:
> > 1. What platforms do we care about supporting in client mode (doesn't need
> > PPS)?
> 
> I don't see how you jumped from client mode to not needing PPS.
> 
> I'm not even sure what "client mode" means.  Does it mean no clients?  aka it 
> is a client of other servers but is not a server for other clients.  If so, 
> client-only might be clearer.

That's what I meant.

> > 2. What platforms do we care about supporting refclocks on? 
> 
> What difference does it make?  I'm missing the big picture for what you have 
> in mind.

The immediate issue is whether we can drop RFC1589 support in favor of
RFC2783.  This depends, on turn, on the range of operating systems
where we want PPS-capable refclocks to work.  Are there any we care
about that have RFC1589 support but not RFC2783?

I think the answer is probably "no", but it's not well defined unless we
have a list of intended target platforms we can check.

There is a possibly larger range of platforms where we want client-only
to work but don't care about refclock support. If we ever support Windows
again it will probably be in this category.  Mac OS X may be as well.

You've said you'd like to test RFC1589 against RFC2783, and that's
a fine idea, but I want to know what our complexity-reduction options are.

So, what's in scope? I assume the list includes Linux and FreeBSD.  We have
tracker bugs up for OpenSolaris. We have port code for Mac OS X. What else?
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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