Keith M Wesolowski wrote:
On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 11:59:27AM +0100, Darren Reed wrote:
What I mean is that you cannot checkout any source code from the
opensolaris.org server and expect to run "./configure && make && make
install"
on any platform. If we ever want to make opensolaris code portable and
And every day I thank my lucky stars for that. Autotools/libtool are
some of the worst pieces of software ever written. They bloat
makefiles with incomprehensible crap, stuff the build process into a
cast-iron straitjacket, and more often than not fail to generate
optimal or even working programs on anything other than GNU/Linux
systems (and not all of those, either).
Please do not go down this path. Not for NWAM, not for anything. A
simple set of small traditional makefiles is easier to maintain,
easier to debug, and easier to port. If I had any spare time, I'd be
going the opposite direction, replacing the autotools garbage in SFW
and the Companion with simple makefiles. The era of a million tiny
Unices, all different, has long since passed; there are very few
platforms of any importance today, and even if you had to write a
couple of makefile includes for each of them you'd end up spending
less time and energy doing that than making autotools work correctly.
The open source communities are quite busy reinventing all
the problems of the 90s and tiny Unices all by themselves with
all the tiny Linuxes, etc. Maybe that's something *you* don't
see but I do. Go have a look in the source code for IPFilter if
you want to see what it means to maintain code that works
cross-platform without requiring the "configure" solution
(and not the code you find in (Open)Solaris, the original code.)
None of this even begins to address the rather bizarre question of why
code destined for ON needs to be portable to other environments.
...
So that we can take a standard or new idea that we want to see
tried/tested/used elsewhere and allow others to build on top of
that rather than to (re)invent their own wheel.
So that we can contribute to the greater open source community
in the same way that it contributes to us.
We do want this to be a two way relationship, don't we?
Darren
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