Cyrus Imap and Automake

[Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)]

Thomas Jarosch wrote:
> Hi Дилян,
> 
> here's some feedback about your build system question.
> Note: I'm not one of the cyrus core developers.
> 
> > if I rewrite the build system of Cyrus imap 2.4(.10) to use Automake to
> > generate the Makefile.in-files, will the patch be accepted in reasonable
> > time in git/master?
> 
> Have you considered alternatives to GNU Autotools?
> 
> We have experience with GNU Autotools in our company projects as well as
> open source projects for several years now.
> 
> We have found that it has several shortcomings:
> 
> 1. Autotools version conflicts
> 
> You can compile a released source package without any Autotools on your
> system. But as soon as you
> 
> a) want to develop
> b) want to install a patch which modifies the build system (like a new path
> to a library, something that adds a new file,...). This is often happens
> as part of packaging for .rpm or .deb.
> 
> you need Autotools on your machine. If the Autotools version on your
> machine and the one used to build the release are not compatible you can't
> build.
> 
> Installing a different Autotools version on a given distribution without
> breaking something or fixing a huge list of dependency problems is nearly
> impossible. I have experience with this...
> 

I have quite the experience with .rpm and .deb building myself as well, and 
while I agree autotools *can* be problematic at times, I recon the Linux 
distributions are not the biggest of problems - the culprit, I think, is with 
the number of custom / site-specific builds out there, ranging from Sun 
Solaris to FreeBSD and who knows what versions of autotools are on these 
systems.

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

-- 
Senior Engineer, Kolab Systems AG

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