[zeromq-dev] Contributing native InfiniBand/RDMA support to 0MQ

[Gabriele Svelto]

 Hi Martin,

2011/12/16 Martin Lucina <martin at lucina.net>:
>
> From my investigation of IB/RDMA it looks like the APIs are typical
> enterprise stuff. Big and complex. The benefit of having a single
> API (ZeroMQ) which you could use for all applications would be huge.

It's actually not very enterprise-ish, from my perspective it's more
HPC-ish which usually means technically very sound but pretty obscure
to the average user and quite different from what people are used to.
Fortunately most of the weirder stuff is now safely hidden below the
RDMA connection manager library that allows you to use plain IPv4/6
addresses and manage connections in a way very reminiscent of TCP
sockets.

> --enable-rdma is fine, I tend to confuse --with-stuff and --enable-stuff.
> Of course you might want --with-rdma=prefix for people who have things
> installed outside of the standard places.

Looking at configure.in instead of having --with-pgm and
--with-system-pgm I would use something like:

--with-pgm=(yes|no|system)

That fits well because AC_ARG_WITH always accepts a parameter, for
RDMA it's currently an on-off flag so I would use --enable-rdma and
eventually adding --with-rdma-prefix to specify a non-standard path
for the sources.

> You can also use your own Git hosting and/or send patches and pull requests
> by email if you'd prefer that, there's no requirement to use Github for
> contributing.

OK, I have a machine where I keep a Subversion repository, I suppose I
can put a Git repository there too, but I'll check GitHub nonetheless,
from the looks of it it's pretty easy to use.

 Gabriele