🚀 go-pugleaf

I am working on porting the Mach 3.0 OS microkernel to a locally
designed machine.

The *big* problem I faced was configuring and building the system.
Mach needs its own special tools, in particular a heavily modified
Make program that you need a BSD license to be allowed to fetch and
compile.

At first I thought that this was a trivial problem. After reading what
documentation there is, and reading through some of the Makefiles, I
decided that this was definitely *not* the case. The Makefiles are
very complex, the Mach configuration stuff I don't understand yet, and
so on...

One of the files in the docs/notes directory of mach.cs.cmu.edu
mentions that the Mach people at CMU are working on moving the
Makefiles over to a format usable by a freely available Make (The OSF
ODE Make based on the BSD-Reno Make from the). This work has been put
on low priority pending a favorable settlement of the BNR-2 lawsuit.

I am not alone in having this problem. It is a problem for everybody
who is trying to work with the Mach code without having a BSD source
license. It also has to be a problem for the FSF. They would seem to
need an OS kernel that can be configured and compiled without a BSD
license.

I am aware of the GNUMach source. I have noted, however, that the
changes to the Makefiles have not been merged into the CMU Mach
release, which makes me suspect that this is a quick hack to get the
stuff to compile. In addition this version of the microkernel is MK68,
while the current release is MK78 (I think), which makes me suspect
that changing the Makefiles is enough of a job that it is difficult to
keep in sync with the releases from CMU.

I have the following suggestions to remedy this problem:

 1. Change GNU Make to support the same facilities as CMU Make
 2. Do the changes necessary to the CMU Makefiles to make them work
    with the ODE Make (or the GNU Make for that matter), and nicely
    ask CMU to start using these Makefiles in their distribution.

Suggestion 2 is the most desirable solution. It is however a biiig
job. It is not "fun" enough that anyone ever is likely to sit down and
do it for free, which means that some company or organization will
have to pay someone to do the work.

The question: is who is going to do it? CMU don't have any incentives
for the time being. OSF? FSF? I don't know.

- Steinar