Re: [Libmesh-devel] Still Really Dislike Automake

[Derek G. <fri...@gm...>]

As you can tell - I got pulled out to dinner last night with collaborators
and never made it back to this discussion...

Hopping back in now...

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 6:00 PM Paul T. Bauman <ptb...@gm...> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 5:06 PM Derek Gaston <fri...@gm...> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 4:36 PM Paul T. Bauman <ptb...@gm...>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> You guys get the blame for this one. There was insistence from MOOSE
>>> developers that the bootstrapped build system be included in the master
>>> tree. I was against it.
>>>
>>
>> No way.  It wasn't in the old build system - and is in the new.  YOU were
>> the one who was trying to take away a feature (multiple simultaneous builds
>> with different METHODS) that *everyone* was (and had been for a long time
>> and still is) actually using to get features *you* wanted with Automake.
>>
>
> If we didn't include the bootstrapped build system in the master tree,
> there would be no diffs when the build system was updated, except for
> Makefile.am or configure.ac, whichever piece was updated. MOOSE
> developers insisted those be included in the new build system. Thus we have
> separate bootstrap commits.
>

Oh damn - we got our argument all twisted up here!  Looking back over the
history - you were replying to a comment I made about how METHODS don't
work very well in the automake system... but you were making a point about
Makefile diffs.  I missed the point you were making and replied with more
force about METHODS :-)

In summary from my argument: METHODS don't work well currently.  It would
be great to solve that with the new system.

Switching over to your statements about bootstrapping: NO WAY!  There is no
way you can convince me that having an un-bootstrapped library is the way
to go.  We have literally thousands of people using MOOSE and they need to
be able to build libMesh simply, reliably and quickly from the Git repo.
If that wasn't the case we would have to maintain our own fork of libMesh
that was bootstrapped or something.  It would be a complete mess.

I don't think any of the MOOSE developers or users ever (basically never)
run bootstrap (excepting John).  Committing the bootstrapped files, while
annoying because they change, was definitely the right thing to do.

Derek

>