Cyrus Imap and Automake

[Дилян Палаузов]

Hello,

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?

The advantages of using Automake:
   * there is no more need to deal with problems concerning parallel builds
   * preferences in /etc/config.site will be honoured
   * with a Makefile.am it is very easy to make cyrus imap use shared 
libraries with libtool (see bug 3095, and email from 24.06.2011 on 
cyrus-devel: currently static binaries are huge). [At least from my 
perspective adding libtool support afterwards is easy]
   * Makefile.am files are easier to maintain than Makefile.in files 
(from my perspective)
   * make install, make dist, make distclean will just work (correctly)
   * the output of 'make' can be made to look nicer  (with silent-rules)

Possible problems:
   * I am not sure right now, how can 'make install' be tweaked to 
install files in /usr/cyrus/bin, but I guess this can be tweaked in the 
worst case by moving the files from /usr/bin to /usr/cyrus/bin
   * automake 1.11's lex.am file has to be patched in order to 
acknowledge, that lex can output files other than lex.c and lex. 
However this tweak is only necessary, when rebuilding Makefile.in from 
Makefile.am (=not done by end users).

I like to have one Makefile.am per project, as described in the article 
"Recursive Make Considered Harmful" by Peter Miller 
(http://aegis.sourceforge.net/auug97.pdf).  If it is for some reason not 
possible to have at the end a single Makefile.am for cyrus imap, then at 
least I would like to reduce the number of automake files as much as 
possible.  (With a single Makefile, when you change a file in 
cyrus-imap/lib and recompile, you are forced to recompile not only 
libimap.a, but all binaries, that depend on this library; the output 
looks nicer with "silent-rules" as it is not printed, that the directory 
is changed; and having a single Makefile speeds up the loading and 
proceeding it, compared to loading several Makefiles)

Any comments?

Със здраве
   Дилян