Re: [Plplot-devel] Where do we go from here?

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

> Alan W. Irwin writes:
>  > Furthermore, I believe that major
>  > improvement should be an AM/LT configuration scheme.  It did not escape my
>  > notice that a substantial fraction of our commits since 5.0.4 had to do with
>  > configuration changes, and I think that ratio would be greatly reduced with
>  > AM/LT once we had overcome the learning curve.
>
> I'm a bit skeptical it would have made a big difference.  It seems to me that
> with the addition of dyndrivers, there were going to be a lot of configuration
> changes regardless of which configuration model we were using.  Certainly the
> commits I made personally left me with that impression.  I don't mean to be
> throwing water on your enthusiasm, I just think it will take a while for the
> payoff from AM/LT (or dyndrivers for that matter) to be really evident.  The
> payoff from cool new features, however, can be immediate.

IMHO, if we improve the configuration organization and overall
infrastructure, then it will make the interesting "cool new features"
substantially easier to do (e.g., fewer and easier configuration commits
then what occurred with the dyndriver changes.) I am glad we continue to
desuckify the current configuration scheme (witness Geoffrey's comments on
the dependency problems that just bit me), but at some point you have to
evaluate how much time that is taking versus the advantages of a new
approach.

From the encouraging things I have read, I am willing to gamble with my time
doing testing on the AM/LT branch that automake and libtool will make our
life considerably easier.  But I don't want to finish Rafael's experiment
alone.

Alan