Matt, I agree with you on the aspect that building c projects with ant feels a bit kludgey. Yesterday I submitted a patch to build the c++ from ant, and calling "configure" from there doesn't seem quite right (no easy way for developers to pass their own configure options). On a machine where I have nonstandard paths, I have to re-run configure manually before it compiles.
The main downside I see to your proposal is that c unit tests won't be invoked from a top-level build, which is nice to have from a development standpoint. If we follow your proposal, there should still be a test target from the ant build that does the compile and test sequence for the c and c++ projects. Scott On 10/16/09 7:54 AM, "Matt Massie" said: > To clarify this first paragraph: > * Hadoop has code dependencies between Java and native code for some > features (e.g. compression) > * Avro Java and C code only share a spec and have no code dependencies. > * The "I don't agree with the approach" might sound like criticism of the > Hadoop build but it's not meant to be. I'm saying that I shouldn't have > modeled the Avro build on the Hadoop build which *does* have code > inter-dependencies for certain features. > > -Matt > > On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 1:16 AM, Matt Massie <[email protected]> wrote: > >> My experience has been that bolting autotool projects to ant projects >> causes *tons* of grieve for developers and consumers alike. Originally, I >> packaged the C code the way I've seen it done for other Hadoop projects even >> though I don't agree with the approach. Now, I'd like to do things >> differently if the team agrees. >> >> I propose the following: >> >> (1) Leave the "cdoc" and "package-c" targets in build.xml but remove all >> other C targets (e.g. configure-c, compile-c). This will allow us to >> continue generating documentation and packaging the C code from ant. >> (2) Change the "package-c" target to run autotool's 'make distcheck' to >> create a distributable tarball (called avro-c-x.x.x.tar.gz). People >> familiar with compiling native code will know to extract the tarball and >> then run "./configure;make". Creating this tarball with autotools will >> ensure that all the necessary files exist (with the correct permissions), >> that 'make install uninstall' works without leaving files behind, remove any >> dependency on autotools, etc. >> (3) Instead of having a "Linux-i386-32" directory inside the top-level 'c' >> directory, users will find a ready-to-use avro-c-x.x.x.tar.gz C package and >> a README file >> >> People who want to work on the C source in svn/git will very likely be >> familiar with how to manage autotools and this setup wouldn't prevent them >> from happily hacking away. Developers and users both would be happy and we >> wouldn't have to abuse ant and autotools in the process. >> >> -Matt >> >> >> >> >> >>
