Re: NMU dpkg series - urgh !
On Sun, Nov 01, 1998 at 03:42:15PM -0700, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>
> On Sun, 1 Nov 1998, Ian Jackson wrote:
>
> > Unfortunately I suppose people will complain at me too much if I do
> > this and drop some of the changes, eg the i18n support (which has a
> > good reason for being there). But I am seriously tempted to throw
> > away automake and perhaps libtool too.
>
> I would throw away automake and libtool. Tom also cursed me with the same
> system that he put on dpkg and I must say it's the most painfull
> experience.. Automake is just a pathetic tool, I can't belive so many
> people use it and even like it!
Well, I agree that it is now unmanageable. automake+libtool do have
some relevance to porting, but its probably better to cook up your own
system. automake can be useful (especially for real GNU projects, I
think), but in the case of dpkg, it was probably a mistake. For me, it
was just a hacking exercise - feel free to get rid of it.
When I first saw automake, I noted that it was much easier to use than
autoconf+lots of makefiles. However, I have now changed my opinion
because:-
a) The speed impact is too great
b) There are better similar tools available
libtool doesn't seem to be being maintained enough to offer useful
features to us at the moment either.
OTOH, if you read some of GNU's stuff re automake and autoconf
(particularly the answer to "why not just use imake? in the autoconf
info files somewhere"), you can see sense in it. One just wishes they
could have made better tools.
> Recently I got sufficiently annoyed and striped all of it and rewrote all
> the make stuff in plain jane gmake - the total size of all the new make
> files is about -HALF- of ONE of the automake generated makefiles. Go
> figure.
>
> On a 486 you'll find that by throwing away libtool + automake you will get
> about a 1.5 - 2 times speed increase in compile times. Also don't forget
> to run configure with --disable-static, that alone will drop half the
> build time!
I do agree totally. A 486/33 is not the system to be using
automake/libtool on.
> Gettext also seems to be in some sort of flux and has problems of it's own
> :<
This is unfortunate, gettext IS useful. Its kind of ironic that
autoconf and automake work as advertised, but we don't want them, and
gettext which we do want doesn't work.
> Personally I would just drop all the crap you don't like, you'll end up
> being more productive in the long run.
I tend to agree here. The build process in dpkg isn't particularly
complicated, and it might well be best to re-create the build system
from the ground up.
--
Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk> <tom@debian.org> http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/
PGP Key: finger tom@master.debian.org, http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/pgpkeys.asc.
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