[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Re: Fragile Build System

[David J. Fiander]

To be honest, I don't particularly like autotools.  It might have  
been useful many years ago when there was much more inconsistency  
between flavours of Unix, but that's not true any more.  There's no  
reason that the core C code can't be set up so that it compiles and  
links cleanly on any generic flavour of BSD or Linux, and that's  
mostly what autotools is about.

The fact is that it's not really clear what Evergreen's dependencies  
are, down to the module release level, or people wouldn't be having  
all the problems they're running into, even when they're using the  
same release of the same distribution as the core development team.

Release engineering is _hard_, and it's different from writing a  
system.  Getting a good solid release package that find what it  
needs, complains about what is can't find, and runs in some sort of  
default configuration once everything's going takes a lot of work,  
and the only way to make sure you've got everything right is by  
taking lots of good notes and then scrubbing the disk and starting  
with a fresh OS install to make sure that you did capture all the  
dependencies, and are doing things in the right order.

- David

On 11-Apr-07, at 14:29 , Mike Rylander wrote:

> On 4/11/07, Jason Stephenson <jstephenson at mailserv.mvlc.lib.ma.us>  
> wrote:
>> Sperr, Edwin wrote:
>> >
>> > Would life just be a lot easier for me if I was running a Debian  
>> box
>> > instead?
>>
>
> [snip]
>
>>
>> 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.
>
> Good thought ... I don't want to do that physically, but it can be
> made to work like that at run time.
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> The core team here agrees completely.  We've have a couple people take
> a look at converting EG to autotools, but no patches as of yet.  Like
> other OSS projects, we've "always relied on the kindness of strangers"
> for anything we don't have specific expertise in ...
>
>> Just my thoughts/grousing for today.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Jason Stephenson
>>
>
>
> -- 
> Mike Rylander
> mrylander at gmail.com
> GPLS -- PINES Development
> Database Developer
> http://open-ils.org

-- 
David J. Fiander
Digital Services Librarian