Cyrus Imap and Automake

[Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)]

Ondřej Surý wrote:
> 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 :).
> 

Between the two of us, Debian and Fedora maintainers, are we both saying "yes 
please, no objections"?

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

-- 
Senior Engineer, Kolab Systems AG

e: vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com
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