First thanks to JMarc and Georg for a great Friday :-)
Angus rightfully warned me that I will face great resistance here wrt to
autotools. I believe it is more inertia than a religious issue. People
are just afraid of potential bad thing that could happen if we touch the
build system.
I would like to propose a simpler way forward.
1) move non lyx core source code that depend on "config.h" defined macro
to "src/support/": mainly gettex.[Ch] and messages.[Ch]
2) make src/support/ a real library with its own autotools machinery.
This library could be code liblyxsupport.
3) simplify the build system of LyX (the executable) to the bare minimum
(ENABLE_ASSERTION, BOOST_*, etc).
All the tricky portability issues would be handled by
liblyxsupport.[a,so]. Of course this would mean that one needs to build
independently two things instead of one. But I guess this is not a
problem as it could be automated. The obvious advantage (to me at least)
is of course that the LyX exe building system would be very easy to port
to scons, cmake, visual studio, etc... Apart from that, I believe there
are additional advantages with regard to maintenance, binary
distribution, etc. It will also force developers to have clear and
stable API in the support library.
It is not friday so no need to argue for days. A simple yes or no from
main historic devels should be enough.
Lars:
JMarc:
Georg:
Martin:
Juergen:
Andre:
Jose:
Angus:
Michael:
Am I missing somebody?
I could begin to move gettex.[Ch] and messages.[Ch] to "src/support/";
would a patch like that will be accepted?
Abdel.
