kbrannen@gte.net writes:
> I'm only a lurker and someone who is trying to learn and evaluate svn,
> but as a newbie, I think the build process is overly complicated. I
> would *strongly* urge moving the autogen.sh step into the top of
> configure, to make a more "normal" build process. Even when there are
> RPMs and tarballs of stable releases, some will still want to get the
> source and build it (e.g. to get some patch that very important to
> them).
I'd like to point out something that hasn't (?) really been made clear
on this thread:
The reason we have a problem is that we're in an Alpha stage where we
encourage most users to build from a working copy. Building from a
working copy is *not* normal, it's just a temporary stage. With
mature software, if one builds at all, one downloads a stable source
tarball and builds that -- in which case Subversion's recipe is the
same as everyone else's:
./configure
make
make install
No autogen.sh required :-).
So the real solution here is to get stable, release official source
distributions more frequently, and not feel that everyone should be
building HEAD all the time.
Note that when building from working copies, almost all packages
include an extra step equivalent to running autogen.sh. Those that
don't usually end up versioning a generated file (`configure'), which
of course has its own problems.
> And if you don't want put a dependency on Python, write the program in
> Perl or "sh". I think almost everyone has Perl on their system, and
> if not, "sh" will definitely be there. (I haven't looked at the
> program to know if "sh" can do what you need, so that may be a bad
> suggestion, but Perl can do anything. :-)
Rewriting it would be a huge time sink for a developer who could
otherwise be fixing real bugs. I understand where you're coming from,
but this problem is a) temporary, and b) has not been solved by any
other package as far as I know... Which should make us wary of
spending time on it.
-Karl
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Received on Fri Oct 25 22:52:25 2002