[reSIProcate] Build systems.

[Alan Hawrylyshen]

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