Modularization development notes [was Re: RFA sent to theArchWG]

[Owen Taylor]

On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 23:58 +0200, Roland Mainz wrote:
> Matthieu Herrb wrote:
> > Otherwise I still re-iterate my concerns that the modularized tree
> > should not depend on GPL licenced tools more than necessary. Please
> > don't let gnu make or gnu m4 only construct leak in X.Org. OpenBSD (and
> > NetBSD if I understand correctly) want to be able to build X using only
> > the base system, which doesn't include the gnu version of these tools.
> 
> I'd like to keep any dependicies to GNU make out of the tree, too.
> Makefiles which use the GNU extensions will only work with GNU make and
> no other version of "make" - which I consider a huge loss as nice
> goodies like the "distributed make" (=a "make" version which can run
> builds in parallel, either locally, over multiple machines or in a
> cluster) can no longer be used to compile X.

Luckily, using automake gives you this for free. It gives you things
like conditionals and includes and then translates them into portable
Makefiles.

>  Additionally it may imply
> some licensing issues when the X tree can no longer be bootstrapped
> without having GNU tools installed (note: I am no laywer nor am I
> familar with this kind of stuff, I am just forwarding the rants which
> came up a while ago in IRC).

There are no such issues.

automake, autoconf, libtool are required only to build out of CVS or 
create the distributed tarball and not to build that tarball. Even if
they were required, they would have no affect on the licensing of the
distributed code.

automake is built on Perl, but that is again only required to create
the distributed tarball or build out of CVS.

GCC, GNU m4, and so forth are not going to be required at all.
Even if they were required, they would have no affect on the licensing
of the distributed code.

Now, if people have an instinctive fear and avoidance of having any
GPL code on their system, pkg-config could conceivably be an issue.
It does not link to your code in any way, and has absolutely *no*
effect on the licensing of your software, but it is required on the
system of the person building the distributed code.

My opinion on that is that pkg-config is a small, well defined program
with highly specified behavior that took only a week or so to write
originally. So, if someone wants to write OpenPkgConfig, they aren't
going have trouble doing so. But I don't think it should block the
development process for X.

Regards,
						Owen

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