star Files

     A new milestone in modular portable programming is ready!

The "Slottable Source Plugin Module" system (SSPM) is an idea that
really is more than 3 years old but I was hesitating to announce it
earlier. Now I can tell you that the new makefile system has been
under test during the last 6 months and nobody complained about any 
problem caused by the SSPM.

The portability overhead is currently about 2 MB. This turns a medium
sized application like 'star' which is about 500 kB of pure source
into a packet that is 5x as big as the pure source size.

As all my applications are based on the Schily SING makefile system
and share a common portability base it makes sense to share the
advantages of the Schily makefile system with all users.

Simple ideas like the SSPM are usually hard to understand by people
from outside, so I try to describe the new system by giving you an
example on how it is used:

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You may test the new system by first downloading the latest
cdrtools package 

	ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/cdrecord/alpha/cdrtools-1.11a23.tar.gz

or newer. Then unpack the source tarball, chdir into the top level
directory of the cdrtools package. Run 'make' and wait until the 
compilation has finished.

So far, there is nothing new (except that some people may recognize
that this is a 'smooth' fully integrated compilation and you don't need
to call 'configure'.

Now, to understand what a "Slottable Source Plugin Module" is, fetch
another source. There is currently only one demo source that is ready
for testing:

	ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/star-1.4-sspm.tar.gz

Unpack this tarball in the top level directory of cdrtools and
call 'make' again. The Schily makefile system does recognize that there
is additional (uncompiled) source and will compile these new parts.
As there is no need to run 'configure' again, compilation of the 
additional 'star' sources is much faster than the compilation of the
complete 'star' source package would take.

To understand how the "Slottable Source Plugin Module" system works,
have a look into the TARGETS directory.....

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