Let me start the e-mail conversation, and see how far we get.

Goal: The goal several of us have is to be able to use the btl’s outside of the MPI layer in Open MPI.  The layer itself is generic, w/o specific knowledge of Upper Level Protocols, so is well suited for this sort of use.

Technical Approach: What we have suggested is to start the process with the Open MPI code base, and make it independent of the mpi-layer (which it is now), and the run-time layer.

Before we get into any specific technical details,
the first question I have is are people totally opposed to the notion of making the btl’s independent of MPI and the run-time ?
This does not mean that it can’t be used by it, but that there are well defined abstraction layers, i.e., are people against the goal in the first place ?

What are alternative suggestions to the technical approach ?

One suggestion has been to branch and patch.  To me this is a long-term maintenance nightmare.

What are peoples thoughts here ?

Rich