On 06/19/2018 09:33 PM, Chase via cdesktopenv-devel wrote:
Hi all,
Matthew T. and I have had a conversation about imake and whether or not
it would be a good idea to merge with master or not. After doing a bit
of discussion, I sent a message to alan coopersmith to see if anyone at
the imake team would be willing to look at our code and help us merge,
to which he revealed to me that there is no imake team, and there hasn't
been one since 2014, and it is very unlikely that anyone else will pick
up the project (he even went as far as to consider appointing me as the
maintainer of imake). So if it wasn't official already, it is now, we
are maintaining both imake and CDE.
Congratulations! :)
I briefly considered moving to
meson, however Matthew informed me that this would severely limit
compatibility with legacy operating systems, and it looks like Cmake has
that same problem. So the way I see it, we have two options going
forward, we either move towards the gnu autotools, or we merge with
master and continue from where they left off on our own. I was
considering posting some patches that would sync us with upstream a bit,
but I don't know how much they would be worth with this news (one of
them enabling cross compiling).
How should we continue from here? Thoughts?
Imake is dead, and I see no point in trying to "take over" and improve
it. Autotools (as others have also mentioned in this thread) is the way
to go moving forward. We might be able to leverage some of the work X11
did there as well.
With autotools, we could get multi-core builds, cross compiler support,
build-time detection of system features, languages, and capabilities,
and much more. We could take advantage of their finer grained
installation support (--bindir=DIR, --libexecdir=DIR, --runstatedir=DIR,
and a dozen others to also resolve the whole "stuff everything into
/usr/dt" issue as well.
We should (as X11 and Motif did) develop it along side Imake until it is
working well enough to just toss out Imake. We would also get "make
install" working (though this does not have to wait for autotools
integration), and we could eventually get rid of the UDB databases and
their dependencies too.
So, I am all for it. A question though, is timing. Should we get a
stable release out first, and then start working on something like this?
Alternatively, we could just keep releasing occasional development
releases until we are ready, but that would mean a stable release might
still be a long way off.
[...]
--
Jon Trulson
"Fire all weapons and open a hailing frequency for my victory yodle."
- Zapp Brannigan
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