[M3devel] Build Server - Plan

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On Sun, Aug 16, 2015 at 07:52:13AM +0000, Jay K wrote:
> The output of autoconf/automake should have lightweight dependencies.They
> might stress make, might require GNU make.They might stress the sh, but I
> think there are adequate shells out there. 

That is typically one issue with autoconf, requiring gnu tools in the
path. On Solaris this can be annoying since most Solaris people don't use
gcc or bash or have them in their path and not all (none of?) the gnu pieces
are up to date or even current by any stretch of the imagination.

> They are meant to be easy for people building stuff to use.They aren't
> meant to be easy for people developing stuff to use. 

Not sure what you meant here...

> Look at this way..while people complain and there are widelyused
> alternatives like cmake, autoconf/automake are in widespreaduse, and they
> do provide things that work for Linux, Solaris, BSD, MacOSX, Cygwin,HPUX,
> Aix, Irix, etc. 

They often don't "work" for Solaris as-installed but they can most often be
made to work. Increasingly, as automake and its prereqs get version bumps
there are problems building apps on Solaris because Solaris installs with a
very back-level version of gcc and a rather incomplete set of gnu tools. I
ran into a problem with the last year where Solaris awk was not good enough
to install(!) an app that compiled on Solaris as part of autotools so I had
to download a newish copy of gawk and install it. So really, it is much
better not to go there if you can avoid it.

I am not suggesting an alternative to autotools but just pointing out it is
not really accurate to say they work on Linux, Solaris, BSD, etc. except for
Linux. I also run BSD on several platforms and because of the same issues as
with Solaris (old copy of gcc and gnu tools and POSIX-compliant awk, sed,
shells, etc. not being good enough for autotools) it is sometimes
non-trivial and painful to get Linux apps built on BSD. There is obviously
no good/easy solution to this, just to point out it is not the slam-dunk as
might be thought. 

> Furthermore, consider any platform that has a native gcc, is likely
> buildingthat with autoconf/automake.

Conceded, yet on Solaris it is not clear why gcc is there. It is old and it
is in a non-standard location and is often not used. Ideally, apps to be run
on Solaris should be able to be built with native (non-gnu) tools. The
Studio compilers are very good and have optimizations for SPARC that should
be better than what gcc can provide and it is also somewhat of a test of C
portability since Studio doesn't necessarily provide all non-standard gcc
extensions.