Hi Guys! I'm getting pretty close to having FreeSwitch up and running on a SPARC Solaris Niagara box (yeah -- that's the one with 8 physical cores and 32 threads per CPU) which is a good news. The bad news (at least from my POV) is that I think I've stumbled upon a particular problem in how FreeSwitch gets built and packaged for which I don't really have a good solution. So, in order for me to move forward I have to make sure that you guys also view this as an issue and that you'd be willing to address it. Here's the deal -- its no secret that FreeSwitch depends on DSOs a *LOT* (in fact, the core of FreeSwitch itself is a DSO library with a simple wrapper bin/freeswitch around it). In general I would divide these DSOs into 3 broad categories: 1. Plugin/modules (including CORE) These guys posses no problem whatsoever -- they get developed within the FreeSwitch SVN repository, they DO NOT get distributed outside of FreeSwitch. They also get built as part of building FreeSwitch. Always. The only trouble with them is that sometimes they depend on functionality available only from external libraries. And that leads us to the following 2 categories: 2. Well-known external DSO libraries These are the things you would expect to see on a reasonably well configured Linux system these days. Things like /usr/lib/libsqlite3.so or /usr/lib/libapr.so.0. Things which get developed elsewhere, have their dedicated maintainers and packagers. And which are relatively easy to find in .RPMs or .DEBs. 3. DSO libraries originating from the FreeSwitch project itself. Now in this category I don't want to discriminate between something that Anthony has written (i.e. libteletone) or something that just got sucked into FreeSwitch for a lack of a better home (i.e. lib/codec/g726). All of these things Now, why am I telling you all this ? :-) Well, simply because during my Solaris "porting" effort I've really convinced myself that we have to have a much better plan for #2 and #3 w.r.t. building and packaging than what we have in FreeSwitch now. And here's why: 1. For the #2 I really don't want to sit through the endless stream of ./configure ; make ; make install if I already have these libraries on my system. What I want instead is a detection mechanism (or --with-<package name>= option for a configure script) that would also warn me about the version FreeSwitch developers deem to be appropriate for each of the packages. 2. As for the #3... my take on it is that we shouldn't really have #3 in FreeSwitch at all. Every single library from that category should either be moved to #1 or to #2. If it ends up being in #2 than it has to be moved to a separate SVN repo. So consider all of the above as a preliminary request for opinions and lets hope to make FreeSwitch really portable and highly configurable at the building and packaging level! Thanks, Roman.