On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 17:59, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems) <vanmeeu...@kolabsys.com> wrote: > Thomas Jarosch wrote: >> Hi Дилян, >> >> here's some feedback about your build system question. >> Note: I'm not one of the cyrus core developers. >> >> > if I rewrite the build system of Cyrus imap 2.4(.10) to use Automake to >> > generate the Makefile.in-files, will the patch be accepted in reasonable >> > time in git/master? >> >> Have you considered alternatives to GNU Autotools? >> >> We have experience with GNU Autotools in our company projects as well as >> open source projects for several years now. >> >> We have found that it has several shortcomings: >> >> 1. Autotools version conflicts >> >> You can compile a released source package without any Autotools on your >> system. But as soon as you >> >> a) want to develop >> b) want to install a patch which modifies the build system (like a new path >> to a library, something that adds a new file,...). This is often happens >> as part of packaging for .rpm or .deb. >> >> you need Autotools on your machine. If the Autotools version on your >> machine and the one used to build the release are not compatible you can't >> build. >> >> Installing a different Autotools version on a given distribution without >> breaking something or fixing a huge list of dependency problems is nearly >> impossible. I have experience with this... >> > > I have quite the experience with .rpm and .deb building myself as well, and > while I agree autotools *can* be problematic at times, I recon the Linux > distributions are not the biggest of problems - the culprit, I think, is with > the number of custom / site-specific builds out there, ranging from Sun > Solaris to FreeBSD and who knows what versions of autotools are on these > systems.
With my fancy debian maintainer hat on - I agree, we learnt how to cope with different versions of autotools, that's the minor thing. I personally I would love to have cyrus projects automakized. It's much easy to mangle :). O. -- Ondřej Surý <ond...@sury.org>