On Thursday 25 August 2005 11:34, John Caruso wrote: > More generally, I'd say that flexibility should be the guiding principle > in the build system (goal 0 on your list). The build system should > provide as much flexibility as possible to the user and impose as few > restrictions as possible, so that users can easily adapt it to many > different environments. That's part of why I was citing the build > methodologies for things like Apache, BIND, and OpenSSL; they're all > converging on a more or less universal way of doing things, and it would > be good if AOLserver 4 followed that model as well, since it makes it > simpler for people coming fresh to AOLserver to grok how it's built.
I'm not really part of this discussion, and actually I'm sure I am misunderstanding the details, but I will at least try to give another perspective. AOLserver is not in any way similar to Apache, BIND or OpenSSL, other than being software. OpenSSL is a library envisioned to be used and linked to by many programs. BIND is a root process setup for general service and maintained by root. Apache is a generic system wide service, which a single instance can assume different environments depending upon the request. It is setup by root, but generally useable by everyone. AOLserver is a user process. The variability of user needs greatly impacts how installation should be handled, how the server should run, modules needed, etc. It is very seldom the case that AOLserver would be used as a generic web server that would coincide with Apache _not_ being a better choice. What is needed is a simple (as simple as possible) tcl script which would build AOLserver given a series of answers to relatively simple questions. A generic installation would then be the source files and the tcl script. Each user would run the script for each AOLserver installation. Probably the script could save the answers in a text file so you could easily replicate/modify a successful installation. Answers files could be compiled for popular platforms, maybe even along with the binaries. But flexibility implies a programming language, in that respect the build process is already flexible, relying on tcl/bash/make etc. The recent move to use tcl more during building AOLserver is a major step forward. It might be useful to consider additional makefile targets which would satisfy the additional requirements for building packages. (Who wouldn't love a simple system which would record what is needed to build a package, so the next time you have to do it, you simply modify a tiny file. Even configure doesn't make a record of what it did.) tom jackson -- AOLserver - http://www.aolserver.com/ To Remove yourself from this list, simply send an email to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> with the body of "SIGNOFF AOLSERVER" in the email message. You can leave the Subject: field of your email blank.
