Hi list,

I've been hacking on a simple script to download, unpack and build
TCL, AOLserver and all needed modules + dependencies. The ultimate
goal of this is to create a simple way to build installable shars of
AOLserver for different plaforms os people can test out AOLserver
easily without the fuss of compiling all the necessary components.

So far I've included ns_cache, nssha1 and nssqlite3 + sqlite3. I'm
still undecided on weather to bundle nsopenssl + openssl or nsnss +
nspr and nss. I have not worked with euther so your opions for or
against either would be appreciated. I'm not even shure we want to
bundle a ssl socket driver since the two free ones both have a hefty
footprint (eithe include a bundled openssl or both nspr and nss).

Another point I'm still unsure about is weather to ship stripped
libs and binaries and exclude documentation (manpages etc.) or include
it. Tis is primarly a size question since I can shave off about half
of the download size. For comparison, these are the current sizes on
Linux-x86:
  11.0M    bia-full
   2.9M    bia-full.tar.gz
   4.8M    bia-stripped
   1.6M    bia-stripped.tar.gz
Remember that this only includes the TCL interpreter, the AOLserver
core, the SQLite database engine, ns_cache, nssha1 and nssqlite3.

Another issue  I'm still unsure how to fix is how to make the binaries
relocatebale to a different directory. The problem first caught my I
while testing on Solaris. I had built a distribution in /tmp/bia and
later moved it to /tmp/bia-full. When I tried to start nsd, I got the
following error:
  ld.so.1: bin/nsd: fatal: libnsd.so: open failed: No such file or directory
  Killed
The problem stems from the paths the linker embeds in the binaries for
their library search path (-R option for most linkers). A simple
kludge would be to provide a wrapper script to start nsd that sets
LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly, but this seems like a big kludge. On the
other hand we can't safely assume everyone will want to install into
/opt/aolserver or /usr/local/aolserver or any other place. Any
thoughts or hints on this issue are welcome.

To summarize:

This works (mostly):
* Script to fetch tarballs and create a build directory
* Makefile to build all components
* Script to wrap a built distribution into a tarball and then into a
  self installing shell archive (currently _very_ crude).
  
This needs to be done:
* Finish the configuration script which helps the user create an
  inital configuration of AOLserver that's tailored to his needs.
* Build on more platforms (currently tested: Linux-x86 and
  Solaris-SPARC, Irix-MIPS is coming)
* More testing.
* Interesting demo apps. (I'll need to finish SIAM first so I can
  package some of the stuff I have as ADP pages for distribution).

Any help is greatly appreciated. As soon as I have more free time,
I'll try to cleanup the code a bit and add some comments so I can post
actual code.

-- Olaff


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