Just to break the monotony of the ping-pong session, I value the effort Noah is exerting to make the build system this solid. I get Paul's pragmatic approach too, but I personally side with doing the build/autoconf thing right up front and head off weird build and packaging horrors as early as possible.
/cranes neck back in B. On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 7:09 PM, Noah Slater <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 8 Nov 2009, at 18:45, Paul Davis wrote: > >> Who in the world actually does this? > > Ubuntu, Debian, etc. I'm sure there are many more. > > VPATH builds are commonplace where automation is used. > > End users don't usually use them, but we target more than just end users. > >> I would be much less whiney if I all of a sudden found out that we have >> someone being uberawesome and running make distcheck on many many >> platforms and as part of that setup used the VPATH builds. > > Forget distcheck, this is broken for check with a VPATH setup. > >> Of course its possible. Just check if you have source files in your >> build directory. > > I cannot agree to a change that makes the test suite non-functional for > VPATH builds. > >> I don't follow. I'm assuming that not lots of people use VPATH builds. > > Yes, I that is an unfounded assumption. > >> If there is some hidden build factory out there that's being kind >> enough to build CouchDB on many platforms then I'd be orders of >> magnitude more interested in making this work. > > Ubuntu, Debian, etc. > >> But the current trend I see is that it breaks distcheck. > > Forget distcheck, that is a symptom of check not working for VPATH setups. > >> To me, I'm not seeing the motivation >> to do anything more than run the checks as part of distsign as opposed >> to distcheck. > > You're treating the symptoms, and not the cause. > > The cause is that our test suite cannot handle VPATH settups. > > This is a bug. > >> I haven't been convinced that this is a wrong vs. right issue. > > We use an Autoconf build system, so we should support VPATH setups. > >> There is a lot of extra stuff that goes into VPATH builds and making sure >> they work properly.. > >> And its just added weight as we accumulate more >> and more testing and build infrastructure. I just haven't been >> convinced that there's a reason we should carry that. > > Because we're trying to grow our user base, not shrink it - and that means > not cutting off deployment scenarios because it was a bit of a chore to get > it working properly. > > This behaviour is not some new crazy feature I dreamt up one night, it's a > standard, and well understood part of having an Autoconf build system - > arguably the oldest active, and most popular open source build system that > exists. > > And sure, it's tricky. But packaging is hard, welcome to packaging. >
