Re: build tools standard

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Jonathan Blandford wrote:

> Unlike most of GNOME, the autotools people use tend to come with their
> distribution.  The concern I have is that we will drive away potential
> developers by making it too hard for them to develop.
Of course, gnome is already fairly complex to build.  Most people are 
using build scripts to because of this, and the most popular CVS build 
scripts can install the build tools for you.

>  On the other
> hand, anything that helps kill gnome-common is a good thing in my book.
> This will presumably assist that.
We can already get rid of a lot of gnome-common, but it would probably 
be good to save that for another thread.

> Just because I'm curious, which bugs/features are we hitting?  Do we
> need to work much more closely with the autoconf/automake maintainers?
I can't think of a good example in the near term (ie. ones that are 
clearly requiring a bug fix, rather than a new feature), but we ran into 
a number of them with automake-1.4.  One of the big ones was the 
non-working BUILT_SOURCES support.  A number of packages implemented 
work arounds using undocumented features/variables that broke in the 
newer versions of automake which incidentally included a working 
BUILT_SOURCES implementation.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/