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Re: [reSIProcate] Build systems.



On 2006.03.09, at 09:28 , Cullen Jennings wrote:


In the past this has been a huge waste of time. I will explain why I say waste. A huge amount of time has been put in to trying to make auto tools work and and it has never delivered something that works. If people want to continue wasting time on this on a branch, I don't care but it needs a very
clear set of QA goals before it gets moved to mainstream.

I agree "make install" needs to work, but as far as I can tell, it works.

If there are some real problems, I'm glad to solve them. If the problem is I wish I could make autotools works - well, there has been plenty of work on
this and I imagine it can continue.


Just to be clear, I'm not advocating autotools. If the resiprocate community is willing to change our code so that it supports more architectures and code in a way that is a little bit more platform agnostic, then we don't likely need autotools. I'm just worried about making dynamic libraries on many platforms. Perhaps this is quite simple and it won't be a problem.

As for the current system. We do not have an installable library. Sure, something gets installed, but woe to the application writer that is unaware of how reSIProcate was compiled, or what version of reSIProcate it is. Some ABI versioning and site-local customizations need to be installed too. (NOT config.h). :-)

We are close and it may well be that the fast-path to getting this is to expand our current build system. That would be great.

I just worry that ABI versioning + dynamic libraries == 90% of what autotools will do. I think our problem with autotools is that nobody on the project at the time we bit it off was 'an expert'. I'm hoping we might have one today, hence my call to arms. :-)

I just want a product we can package and have other applications use if it's installed on a system.

Detailed requirements for the build system will hopefully fall out of this discussion -- I am aware that once upon a time we had a list of requirements for giving autotools the green light. We never made it that far, either through lack of effort or possibly ignorance or lack of familiarity on our part.

Let's see where we are at today so we can start 'installing' our fantastic SIP stack.

Alan