This is a great discussion and I want it to keep going. But I'm going to try to lay out how I plan to move forward and hopefully this will help in the future.
I'm going to use autotools for building only the C pieces and not for anything else. I want to be able to use this as a normal release/target system afterwards installed like any other. So I don't want to use something for placing config files or whatever. I know that won't mold well with the normal CouchDB use-case but maybe its simple to do both... Or I'll realize thats futile and do something with setting where configs live through sys.config when its passed to erlexec... Anyway, I'd hope my fork could be seen as a testbed of sorts. As I said, it should be buildable with rebar as well. Tristan On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 11:04 PM, Noah Slater <nsla...@echolibre.com> wrote: > > On 4 Nov 2010, at 03:53, Noah Slater wrote: > > > Autotools is a big, stinking, POS — but it gets the job done, precisely > because it's been around for 20 years. [1] This software has been tested on > and ported to so many systems, it would make your mind boggle. If you're > distributing source packages to a large user-base, especially with C code, > there are very few sensible alternatives. > > Something occurred to me after sending this email. I wrote the CouchDB > build system three years ago now. The only major changes I've ever made to > it since then have been additions for new pieces of CouchDB proper. The > amount of bugs that are found in it are minimal, to say the least. They say > that data matures like wine, and software matures like fish — but it's been > one of the most enduring bits of code I've probably ever produced. And I > credit that entirely to the Autotools maintainers. Hehe. > >
