Some thoughts on the modularization effort

[Adam Jackson]

On Wednesday 30 March 2005 19:15, Kean Johnston wrote:
> By the way, my comments about "./configure; make install"
> not just working are both almost always issues with libtool
> or automake or both. Those projects that avoid them are not
> thus afflicted.

These are not new sentiments, I've heard them many times.  I tend to agree 
with them too.  This is one area of the proposal that hasn't received much 
attention: when we do go with autotools, how far do we go?

libtool is overkill for X's needs.  The most complex thing we need to do in 
terms of DSO generation is not link the server modules against the system 
libraries, and specify precise sonames.  Every ld I know of has a pretty 
painless way to do this; on gnu toolchain systems, where apparently libtool 
works best, it's trivial, so why use libtool in the first place.

If we decide not to use libtool, Mesa's mklib script might be a better place 
to start.

The automake argument I don't have as much experience with so I'd appreciate 
some input.  The modularised bits we have now use Makefile.am's.  How do we 
translate them to simple Makefile.in's?  Is there a positive benefit to using 
automake?

I'll throw out some data points here: modern linux systems ship with only two 
versions of autoconf, but as many as five versions of automake.  And by far 
the most common build problems people have with the modular bits we have stem 
from using the wrong version of automake.

Fortunately these are separable components.

> If you do use the autotools, I have a small patch for autoconf
> that I've submittd but never seen accepted (nor seen rejected
> either) that makes the generated configure scripts more portable
> and less likely to overflow shell limits on older systems. Its
> a tiny patch and I'll post it here for those that are interested.

We can definitely lean on the autoconf people to get that merged.

- ajax
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-modular/attachments/20050330/e99dcdf6/attachment.pgp