Cyrus Imap and Automake

[Ondřej Surý]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 17:59, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)
<vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com> wrote:
> 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.

With my fancy debian maintainer hat on - I agree, we learnt how to cope with
different versions of autotools, that's the minor thing.

I personally I would love to have cyrus projects automakized. It's much easy
to mangle :).

O.
-- 
Ondřej Surý <ondrej at sury.org>