Re: Increasing regularity of build systems
"David N. Welton" <davidw@linuxcare.com> writes:
> Hi, while working on the ARM port, I've begun to become frustrated
> with the IMO, not entirely necessary diversity in our "rules" files.
I agree with this. And I think debhelper is of enourmous value. I
have been sceptical of other scripting systems (having written one
myself at one point, I think I had better reason than most), but I
think debhelper tends to be sensible and useful.
If it makes you feel better, it was worse for the alpha (and probably
even worse for m68k, I'm sure, since they had at least dealt with some
people's bad habits before the alpha was started).
> It would be nice if more packages built as if you were running a
> regular make, instead of restarting from the beginning (running
> ./configure again), and in a more consistent manner.
Unless I'm misunderstanding---entirely possible---I think this
paragraph is talking about an entirely different thing from the first,
and as frustrating as the status quo might seem, I think the
alternative would be worse.
./configure introduces a lot of system dependency in its generated
files, and _much_ of the variation is, at least on debian boxes,
architecture related. While I'm sure a sufficiently motivated
maintainer could probably carefully factor out all the arch-dependent
stuff, and we might could push through a standard location for
building all packages so that my use of ~/prog/package-name (and its
subsequent introduction into makefiles and the like) wouldn't break
the compile on your machine, but then when the package gets updated
upstream, we have to reapply all the patches, etc.
I think you'd see development slow to a crawl.
Or maybe I'm just being dense and latching onto your mention of
./configure, and not addressing what you're actually talking about.
Mike.
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