Further notes on 7.4

[Brian Paul]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 04:11:52PM -0700, Dan Nicholson wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Daniel Stone <daniel at fooishbar.org> wrote:
>>> I think all the reasons I raised in the core fonts mail still apply
>>> here.  People bootstrapping from scratch have a hard life as it is, so I
>>> think it makes sense to ease the load on our core audience of people
>>> building on existing distributions, and just include one more
>>> documentation point for people who already have to follow a lot of very
>>> sketchy documentation.
>> Yeah, I suppose that you're mostly right about who the people are who
>> are building X and that they can keep using the X apps on their
>> distro. What I'd like to see, though, is a clear data point that says
>> "here are the tarballs for the core X installation, but you can get
>> all the extra/legacy/whatever stuff here (link to
>> releases/individual)". It sucks when something changes and the only
>> notice is a message buried in mailing list archives.
> 
> Please, I wouldn't want anyone to think I'm against them writing
> quality, easily-found documentation on our wiki. :)
> 
>>> Can Mesa package this then, preferably with the rest of its build system
>>> (i.e. in its tarball)?  All yours, krh's and George's good work into
>>> uncoupling our build systems thus far has been brilliant, thanks. :)
>> If makedepend was a single C file, I'd feel more comfortable
>> shoehorning it into mesa. But, you can certainly make GCC do the exact
>> same thing with -M -MF. I don't know about other compilers, though,
>> which is the hangup.

I don't recall other C compilers having a dependency generator option 
like gcc.


> I dunno.  Either way, it just seems really strange for Mesa's build to
> depend on something that only we provide, and even then it's very
> undocumented.

I've found makedepend on (almost?) every flavor of unix system I've ever 
used (Sun, IRIX, AIX, Ultrix, BSD, HP-UX, Stellix(!), etc).  There's a 
man page for it, btw.


>  Surely, if only one external project uses it for their
> own home-grown buildsystem, it's better for them to maintain that in
> there along with mklib and friends, and that way they can control it if
> they need to change it as well?

I bet there's other apps out there that still use makedepend, esp. in 
the technical graphics/sci-vis circles.  A lot of those apps are old but 
are still used every day.

I was using it for many years (early 90s) before I learned that it was 
part of X and not just another unix devel tool, like cc.

As long as the distros still include makedepend with the other 
development tools, I guess I don't care what X.org does.

If people start reporting that Mesa won't build because makedepend is 
absent, I guess I'll pull it into Mesa.  But I have a feeling that Mesa 
users won't be the only ones complaining.

-Brian