Matt Dillon always do things which are amazing and earning our respect!! Today he announced a major change in DragonFly’s build architecture, while this will likely to cause some temporary quakes, we believe that the migration will be finished soon and we will have a much better (say, cleaner than FreeBSD’s approach) DragonFly buildworld path!

Traditionally, make world or kernel will create directories like /usr/obj/usr/src, etc. This approach, however, does make it hard for us to know what are generated during the bootstrap compile step, cross compiler step, or other steps. Matt’s new proposal is quite impressive: flatten the directory and give them better name, like btools__ for bootstrap, ctools__ for cross compiler tools, and world__ for main world (to quote Matt’s original post).

Of course the renaming is not the only, and not the most important one we can expect from the major improvement. Matt has expressed that he will add more .ORDER constraints. With this we will be able to do -j N builds much more effciently. There are also more other improvements, please check it out from DragonFly’s list.