Hi Bruce,
On 27 Sep 2008, at 01:02, Bruce Korb wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 9:25 AM, Gary V. Vaughan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have an (undoubtedly caffeine induced) idea... why not enhance
gnulib to
provide a shim that sits between the system libraries and client
code that
wants to use it without shipping (another copy) of the particular
parts it
depends upon?
If we add a compile-and-install-everything-as-a-library mode to
gnulib, many
GNU packages could stop distributing the MiBs of autotools'
generated glue,
and instead go with a much lighter build system that simply depends
on
gnulib API semantics, and requires that gnulib be installed. For
many
modern systems, the installed gnulib might turn out to be vanishingly
small... and for many old and broken systems, having just one copy
of gnulib
in shared memory ought to provide a nice improvement to speed and
memory
utilisation.
Please tell me I'm crazy right now. Or at least before I waste the
next few
months of my free time figuring out how to do it.
Hey Gary,
Long ago, far away and years ago, that is *precisely* the point I
was making.
(Remember the autotool bake-off contest?)
I remember it well. Code Sourcery.
My thinking then (and now) is that
you just make your project depend upon the pre-installation of this
common
glue package. Glue layer not installed? Then your's won't install
either.
Yep.
I think some folks won't buy into it because they don't want another
dependency
for their projects. (I think that was the main objection to my
proposal for that long-ago "contest".
Really? I thought the main objection was that writing the glue layer
would
take a man-decade of effort.
The thing that struck me a few days ago was that gnulib actually
provides
all the code that such a shim would need, only it has to be copied
piece-meal
into the packages that want to take advantage of it as it stands.
Although it
does that very well.
Outside of the autotool and GNU communities, the vast majority of
people I
encounter strongly dislike the difficulty of using autotools in client
packages, and the megabyte or two of shell scripts and m4 macros that
every
GNU package seems to carry around with it. Wouldn't it be great if we
only
had to run that stuff *once* (when installing gnulib) and every other
command-line package that paid attention could remove all of their
autotools
glue?
Can't seem to put together the right Google search to
dredge it up again...)
I'm not sure it's still around in that form any more :)
Anyway, at least _I'd_ like to see it. :-D
And no one is telling me I'm an idiot yet... looks like a green light
to me :D
Cheers,
Gary
--
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