Fragile Build System (was Re: [OPEN-ILS-DEV] Perl Module Issues)

[Jason Stephenson]

Sperr, Edwin wrote:
> 
> Would life just be a lot easier for me if I was running a Debian box
> instead?

Maybe, but I have had little luck getting a working build on a Debian 
Etch machine after banging at it off and on for the past week. The week 
before that I was trying on FreeBSD.

I consistently get a make error on the web-install target with Evergreen 
1.1.3. In order to track that down, I've had to concatenate install.conf 
with all of the subproject/subdirectory Makefiles in order to do makes 
in the individual directories to see the actual cause of the vague 
error.--No, I haven't actually rooted it out, yet.

Additionally, I've dropped the database and recreated it a couple of 
time. Now, I get all kinds of errors from the database creation scripts 
about missing schemas, etc. That phase asks for the postgres user 
password way too often, I guess because all of the various steps are 
isolated in their own little script files. I think it would be helpful 
to consolidate all of that into 1 script.

I think a lot of the build problems that I've encountered and that have 
been reported by others on this list would be alleviated if Evergreen's 
build system were switched from the interlocking set of Makefiles to the 
GNU autotools system. With proper prerequisite checks and automake 
templates, a lot of what we're having to tease out by hand could be 
handled by software.

Just my thoughts/grousing for today.

Cheers,
Jason Stephenson