[ST-devel] Re: packaging libst: autoconf and libtool

[Gene <ge...@pa...>]

Hi all,

I don't want to get into philosophical discussion about
good and evil of the autoconf and libtool, but here is my
$0.02 why they are a wrong way to go in the ST case.

Trying to replace things that are known to work best on a
given platform with a guess just to fit into some artificial
build framework is a WRONG thing to do.  This would be a
serious step backward.

Guess is only good when you have nothing else and you bear
no responsibility for the result.  ST has its roots in the
industrial software and shares its philosophy -- you gotta
be sure that your software works properly on all supported
platforms before you ship it to customer.

ST already has all the (hopefully) best settings for each
supported platform.  Why would you want to revert it to
a guess?  If the -fpic flag has to be added on Linux, it
should be added in the appropriate Makefile section.

Some fundamental things (like thread context initialization)
can never be guessed 100% correctly in all cases.

I believe the right thing to do for automated builds is to
figure out OS and then just invoke make with the appropriate
default arguments.  For example, if OS is Solaris 2.x, just
call

gmake solaris-optimized

Minimum guesswork.  The only step which is currently missing
is figuring out the OS.

Thanks,
Gene