> > I am willing to throw more time at fixing this stuff, but I need > > to understand how we got to this point. I went back and read > > the mail archives surrounding the decision to drop automake > > and go with this stuff, but my guess is that the existing scripts > > simply weren't meant to be used in a multiheaded tree, and a lot > > of stuff has been added willy-nilly just to keep it working. > > I'm afraid I don't have much to offer on the "how we got here" front > (except that we've agreed several times that libtool is the spawn of the > devil and should be killed :-). But I would certainly be in favour of > sorting the mess out! And while you are at it, I'm very suspicious of > dependencies - they really don't seem to work properly...
We got here piecemeal, just like most things. Originally, the buildconf script was exactly what you proposed Roy, a simple shell script. Then we decided to make it more complex. I asked a few weeks ago about removing libtool and autoconf from the tree for good, assuming that I would get a vast majority and we could clean this up. Instead, I believe there were 2 votes for removing it, and three or four for keeping it. I said that was the last time I would raise the issue. I tried a while ago to clean up the apache tree, so that it just used the APR definitions for building, so what you are seeing now is a lot less cruft than there used to be. The goal has been for some time (since ApacheCon Orlando), for APR to provide 99% of the autoconf magic that Apache needs. Obviously, we aren't there yet. I believe that the goal is basically the following: Apache's buildconf runs APR's buildconf and APR-util's buildconf first, then it sets up any other supporting programs, and finally it sets itself up. The configure script should also work the same way, APR, then APR-Util, then other supporting projects, then Apache. Same goes for make. I also tried at one point to make APR-util use APR's version of config.guess, config.sub, libtool, etc. My idea was to make APR-util do it first, and then get Apache to work the same way. It is still in the STATUS file, but nobody has gotten to it yet. As for compiling without libtool, good luck, and more power to you. We have really bought into libtool with this build process, and I am not sure that it will be easy to remove. Finally, as for why APR and Apache sometimes use different words for the same thing, legacy. I wrote the original APR configure script at about the same time that Manoj and Rasmus were writing the Apache one. They copied PHP, I copied something else (don't ask me to remember what, it was almost two years ago). As we have found these, we have tried to correct them. Please, feel free to find and fix more of them. Ryan _______________________________________________________________________________ Ryan Bloom [EMAIL PROTECTED] 406 29th St. San Francisco, CA 94131 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
