Hi Bruno,
On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 3:43 AM, Bruno Félix Rezende Ribeiro <
oitofe...@gnu.org> wrote:
> I sent a message a few days ago to this very mailing list
> expressing my desire of migrating CDE's build system to GNU
> Autotools[0]. Unfortunately, CDE developers don't seem very receptive
> to this idea.
>
CDE has been around for a long time and supports a lot of platforms despite
it being a tangled mess, I suspect they don't want to break legacy since it
would drive off as many people as it will bring in, at least initially.
> I'm not the first one looking for this, however. Oleksiy has
> contributed a significant amount of code for this end long before I
> came to the scene[1]. His lengthy patch and the discussion around it
> was just plainly ignored to the death of his helpful initiative.
>
Awesome, thanks for the link!
His work is a much better starting point than mine. I am by no means an
autotools expert, I've just started to scratch the surface because I am
interested in learning more about how they work. I was able to get most of
the object files for dtfile to compile and have been working my way
backwards down the various libraries through the evening.
https://github.com/sedwards/cde/compare/develop
On Sourceforge there are 8 forks of CDE's VCS code, but none of them
> implements Oleksiy changes, or any other in the direction of GNU
> Autotools. Even if a patch for this end was accepted by the main
> developers, they would still require Imake build system to be working
> in parallel (imagine the mess), dragging the development of a efficient,
> stable and standard build system. Furthermore, they require any
> contribution to be under a permissive license, and I don't feel
> comfortable with that, because to me copyleft is an achievement we
> should not give up without a very compelling reason, for the benefit of
> user's freedom. Therefore, I'm afraid there is no other reasonable way
> of getting the build system migrated seamlessly if not by a fork.
>
I don't mind using more permissive licensing, if for no other reason than
to make sharing patches easier, but also to honor the intentions/desires of
the other authors, but I am afraid your right about the need to fork it to
clean it up.
I think it would be better to view the existing CDE release as frozen and
break whatever needs to be broken to bring it up to date on Linux, BSD and
OS X.
> The first step is to migrate CDE's code to GNU Savannah[4]. Then we
> can say good bye to the bloated and awful Sourceforge web interface and
> its commercial appeal[5].
>
I prefer to work out of github, however it's easy enough to add other
remotes to git. My tree pushes to both my sourceforge and my github
accounts so if you wanted to spawn up an 'offical' fork on Savannah, I can
add that as a remote and push to it first.
> What do you think? Don't you want to contribute to this effort even
> further?
>
Sure, I'm going to read through Oleksiy's patch try to take advantage of
the work he already did. I've specifically not tried to support many
platforms out the gate just to keep things simple so I might end up
combining my configure script with his Makefiles.
Thanks for the feedback and help!
--
Steven Edwards
"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world, and that is
an idea whose time has come." - Victor Hugo
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