modular -> monolithic

[Matthias Hopf]

On Jan 22, 08 19:44:50 -0500, Alex Deucher wrote:
> > It is easy to build!.. I really don't see why people are struggling so
> > much with it! Here: it took me a couple of hours to write a script
> > that goes through the categories building each package based on these:
> 
> Here's the quick perl script I wrote:
> http://www.botchco.com/alex/xorg/buildx.pl

These two statements actually show the main problem:

Everybody is using their own scripts. Everybody who's with X for some
time now.
There is no *official* script for fetching/building X - and I honestly
think that this is a major show stopper for new contributors. We also
don't have a good wiki page (or even structure(!)) describing the build
process on a top level.

This is not unsolvable, so maybe it's a good time to discuss, how this
build system should look like, and on what base it should work. I did
some contributions to build.sh, but I don't consider this to be even
remotely good enough to actually being worked on.

IMHO a good build system would have to

- be able to build a single subsystem or everything(TM)
- be able to clone/update subsystems
- fetch all dependencies when building a single subsystem
- track these dependencies, so no subsystems are built that are not
  needed, no automake or configure if not necessary
- configure-once-run-without-arguments (but overwriteable)
- install the systems in a user specified directory
- have a --dry-run or -n option for only showing what it would do
- build drm and Mesa as well
- be able to build outside the source directory
- have a low dependency list itself (e.g. is perl ok?)

So are there already any solutions out there that come even close to
this list? Any additional features that are a must?

My 2 cents

Matthias

-- 
Matthias Hopf <mhopf at suse.de>      __        __   __
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