Jon Trulson <j...@radscan.com> writes: > 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.
Well, my expectation was that we would just keep it working, nothing more. The advantage to imake is that it is simple. Trying to actually improve it much past where its at would probably be counter-productive. > 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. Yes, yes, YES =) I had already been considering some work on parallel make. If autotools can aid with this in any way, so much the better. It would really help, especially on my SPARC hardware... > 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. Yeah, I think so too. I'd rather get chunks of autotools working at a time, rather than go whole hog all at once. Are we going to go straight for modular packaging as well, or hold off on this until we have autotools builds working right? I think these are somewhat separate issues... > 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? Definitely get a stable release out first. I'm hoping Ulrich will come back with a green light on the Motif patch soon; everything else on my end is ready for release. > 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. I don't think autotools builds (and all the subtle bugs we might run into using them) are worth delaying the release for, from an end-user perspective. I think the only thing that should be holding up release at this point are fixes for build breakage or moderate-severe end-user experience bugs. We can always make another release sooner rather than later if it comes to it. We don't need to wait another two years. =) -mrt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
