Hi all,
I'm currently re-reading my notes for the upcoming release and found
something I noted not that long ago regarding the TARGET variable of
the makefile. The list of operating systems hasn't changed in a while
and in parallel we've added a bunch of build options that do not solely
depend on the kernel anymore, but more on features related to the whole
environment (pcre, openssl, lua, systemd, zlib, and so on).
I thought that now that the targets definition is very simple in the
makefile, we could simply add distro names and versions and adjust the
set of default USE_xxx variables based on this. We could thus have
rhel{8,7,6,5}, debian{9,8,7,6}, ubuntu{18,16}, fedora{31,30,29} and so
on, just like we already have for solaris/openbsd/freebsd for example,
except that we generally only reference one version there. It would
become easier to add new variants even to stable distros to ease the
build for new users, who would just have to issue "make TARGET=debian9"
for example, without having to figure if PCRE2 has to be specified or
OPENSSL or any such thing.
This this is fairly minor and basically just requires a few lines to
be added to the makefile and to the doc, so I'm fine with including
this to the final release.
So my questions are :
- does anybody think it's a bad idea ?
- and among those who support the idea (if any), do you use
particular options for a given distro (pcre2, lua version, systemd)
- should we consider that using these pre-set distros enables more
features by default given that packages are readily available ?
(openssl seems obvious, zlib and pcre{1,2} probably, lua maybe)
Note that it is also something we can add as backports after the release.
It's just that if we want to teach people to start using a distro name
over a kernel version, we'd rather propose a few entries first.
Thanks for any hint,
Willy
