Modularization mailing list and initial strawman proposal

[Alan Coopersmith]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 01:01:35AM +0100, Roland Mainz wrote:
> 
>>This is the part which I fear a lot: The autotools pick up dependices to
>>things they find on the system regardless whether this is usefull or
>>not. I have VERY bad experiences with this kind of autodetection and
>>it's one of the things which forced people to have seperate, clean build
>>machines just to make release builds of Mozilla/Firefox/etc. on some
>>platforms (or use an chroot'ed environment (which was a pain in the past
>>as some stuff as the license manager stuff in the Sun Workshop 5 days
>>was very allergic against chroot'ed environments when you had a
>>node-specific license)).
> 
> 
> Then all the autotools usages you've looked at are terrible, to be
> blunt.  If you write them properly, you offer the user three options:
> force enabling (and error out if you don't find it and the user
> doesn't specify a particular prefix); force disabling (in which you
> don't even check for it, you just disable it flat out); and
> autodetect and use if it's there, which is the default.

This was mentioned in the proposal - autodetect and use if present is 
good for end users, but distributors require the ability to control
which other packages they depend on, and so we listed that as a 
requirement for the modularization.   I don't know how exactly we'll do
this - a couple ideas were tossed around, but the proposal doesn't go
into that level of specifics yet.

> As a distributor, I don't know of any pain to do with shared libraries
> (which comes after having explicitly enabled shared builds of several
> libraries, such as libXau, that are for some reason still static-only
> upstream), and I assure you that I am the first one to know of any pain
> whatsoever.

We've also made libXau and libXdmcp shared on Solaris with no problems.
We won't ship static libraries any more - so if the API is not yet
stable enough to go out shared, they're too unstable for us to bother
with.

-- 
	-Alan Coopersmith-           alan.coopersmith at sun.com
	 Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering