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

[Mike Rylander]

On 4/11/07, David J. Fiander <djfiander at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 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.
>

Can't ague that, however...

> 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.
>

... and that's where we need help.  We can't replicate these problems
that people see, even on a clean machine.  It always "just works" for
us, so we're obviously taking something in our environment for
granted.  Of course we're far too close to the problem to actually
identify what that might be.

> 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.


Again, it's hard to argue against that plan, but the dev team is
definitely not the team to do this.  This is unfortunate, since we're
the ones that have some expendable time that is at lease partially
subsidized specifically for EG, but ATM I don't see a way around
continuing the search for volunteer to jump on this.

IOW, (a big part, or maybe most of) the benefit of having someone else
move the system to autotools (or whatever) is, well, exactly that --
it's /someone else/.  Someone that, hopefully, won't make the same
assumptions about the env as we do/have/are...  autotools just happens
to be a good, standard target for exactly what we want.  That being
said, if someone wanted to clean up the current build system so it
works across *linux, *bsd, solaris, etc, then that would be awesome.

I think the point we can /all/ agree on is that a cleanup is required,
and the least efficient way for that to happen is to have someone
that's not having any problems (read: doesn't see the breadth and
depth of the cleanup required) to do this.

So ... consider this call for help, all.  A plan would be a good
start.  Let's start talking about how to get there from here in a bit
less haphazard manner.

--miker

>
> - 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
>
>
>
>


-- 
Mike Rylander
mrylander at gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org