Cyrus Imap and Automake

[Ondřej Surý]

On Mon, Aug 8, 2011 at 17:45, Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)
<vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com> wrote:
> 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"?

I am even saying: "Yes, please, no objections. I will send patches."

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