[David James]
> I do know that there are users who run './autogen.py && make
> extraclean-swig' so that they can rebuild the bindings with their
> personal version of SWIG, although I'm not sure why they do that.
Just to answer this last question: I do this, for the official Debian
Subversion packages, mainly to be sure I can. We advertise that all
our software is free, and we give you source code to everything ... but
what if you wanted to modify the swig bindings and then you found out
that they required some exotic version of swig that, for whatever
reason, isn't in Debian? Access to source (including the swig
bindings) is fairly useless without the ability to modify and rebuild
it, so philosophically, I think we've effectively promised our users
both things. By rebuilding everything from scratch _every_ time, we
can be confident that we're fully self-hosting (our whole OS is
buildable with the tools and libraries we ship.)
(Also, if we had to quickly issue something like a security update that
touched the bindings, that would be an unfortunate time to discover
that we needed to hack around a buggy and unsupported version of swig,
or autoconf, or whatever.)
--
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/
Received on Thu Sep 27 02:28:21 2007