On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 03:06:32PM -0700, Alan DuBoff wrote: > Currently there are thousands of packages that do produce useful software on > platforms such as Linux or *BSD for that matter. It really is as easy as > saying, "make install", and have no compilation errors, a clean binary > produced. > > The OpenSolaris community should make an effort to modify the gnu tools used > for much of that software (autoconf, automake, et al). > > No matter what the arguments are, or what environment is needed to be setup, > this should be done in the configure.in and other configuration files so that > it is as simple as "make install".
To the extent that this is true on any platform (which is not nearly as much as you might think), I agree that it should be true on Solaris, and I'm sure the other OpenSolaris distribution vendors will agree that it's a desirable property for their products. Fixing autotools and their consumers would be a huge win. Of course, so would giving autotools a nice long soak in a napalm bath. > Since much of the software uses /usr/local, that would only put > OpenSolaris in better alignment, IMO. We'll probably disagree on > this, and that's fine. It seems so. > Even much of the GNU configurations include changes for win32, and > READMEs exist for those folks. Please at least consider some type of > effort to create READMEs for those projects (at minimum), so that > the average person can understand whey they can't just, "make > install", and get usable results. Again, this points to the correct approach - fixing the upstream software to understand Solaris and other OpenSolaris-based systems. If fixing a particular component is impossible or impractical, documenting the requirements to get a working set of binaries is the next best thing. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Solaris Kernel Team "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!"
