Hi Martin, On 2010 May 18, at 10:39, Martin Vogel wrote:
> Hi Pritpal, Viktor, all, > > sorry for chiming in, but your discussion reminds me of an idea that, I hope > I remember that correctly, Phil Barnett had many years ago. > > Why not follow the roads of TeX/LaTex, PERL et al. and create a comprehensive > harbour archive network, i.e. a package system for contribs? > > I remember a discussion about splitting off "contrib" from core Harbour (also > many years ago), and people feared at that time that "contrib" would fall > behind in development, so the split was not done. > > I think the situation has changed significantly since then. Harbour is stable > and mature now, a very good and solid base for library development. The focus > of development is now more and more in "contrib", correct me if I'm wrong. > > "CHAN" could be integrated with hbIDE, for easy download, installation & > upgrade of libraries... > > This way, core harbour would not be bloated and people might have an easier > way to start their own contribs, even if it was "only" platform-specific or > for a certain software environment... I agree completely. Detachment of contribs from core is still an important issue to me, but putting the focus on the technical side of it, rather than dealing with the physical location of contrib sources. The latter is just a detail given we have proper infrastructure at hand. The current goal is to move contribs to hbmk2 as their build tool. I've just added HB_BUILD_ADDONS which is another small step to this direction. With it, you can easily "integrate" additional "contribs" to the build process. .hbc files are in place. One remaining task is invoking hbmk2 with .hbp files found in the contrib area, with proper 'clean' and 'install' support. Another remaining problem is dependency detection in hbmk2. And another one is supporting special needs like 'moc' tool in HBQT. Honestly I have no idea how this will be solved yet. At the end the idea is to have a flexible list of "addon" projects (we can call them "contribs" or "3rd parties" or whatever), where each addon can be easily added removed to/from the Harbour build process, and allowing the same to be done for distribution packages, and finally allowing such addon packages to be added/removed _after_ installation on an end-user system. [ One another problem is to solve above "addon" system in a *nix environment. I haven't received any input about this so I'm still in the dark here. ] BTW currently the package descriptor file is '.hbc'. Viktor _______________________________________________ Harbour mailing list (attachment size limit: 40KB) Harbour@harbour-project.org http://lists.harbour-project.org/mailman/listinfo/harbour
