Hi all!
So yesterday was the great news about Cray acquiring PathScale and "us" having an agreement in place to become the new PathScale. It should go without saying yesterday was busy. Path64 moving forward will be the community version of PathScale. We plan to let anyone in the community use the trademark as needed to avoid brand forks like IceWeasel or CentOS.
Right now there's a few branches of "PathScale" we're going to be merging
- One with extra MIPS stuff that SiCortex was working on
- Path64 with misc breakage and build fixes
- Fred Chow's work on the 3.3 beta (most stable and best performance afaik)
Our plan is to take the "official" PathScale from SiCortex and then merge in Fred's branch. This branch will become what's known as 3.2. Then my build changes and other fixes will get merged in and be the start to 4.0.
The build repo as a result of this will not include all the source. (Don't throw rotten tomatoes at me yet please) There's a lot of code we'll be releasing and we need to consider a couple things
- We have the right to release the code. I know right now there's some optimized math libraries that could get us in trouble. (Maybe someone in the community helps us replace them. We'll be contacting the copyright holder and politely requesting to release the source. They are big companies and it may take time.)
- We need to pick the best license. The BSD community could really use a debugger. PathDB could sove this, but we need to talk with those in the BSD community.
PathScale also came with a *huge* test framework and knowledge base about the code. Through a continuous integration system and a mercurial patch queue new developers will be able to test their patches before official patch review or inclusion. We're planning the hardware for this now so as it arrives and is put in the datacenter we'll try to make it available as quickly as possible. Mailing list and forums will also be announced as they are available.
