Cyrus Imap and Automake

[Thomas Jarosch]

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...

2. Build speed and parallelization

The configure run can't be run on multiple cpu cores at once and is usually 
slow. 

Running compile jobs on multiple cores at once can become tricky if you have 
internal dependencies like libs that are included in your project. Sometimes 
we experienced race conditions or cases where you had to start the build 
process two or three times to get a successful build.

3. Documentation and learning

There is a book about Autotools (http://sourceware.org/autobook/). I have 
read it and don't think that it explains how to use and troubleshoot 
Autotools in a good way. Maybe it's hard to explain because in Autotools 
everything is a macro that calls a macro that calls a macro...

I think the learning curve of Autotools is very steep and finding out what's
really happening during troubleshooting is very time consuming.

Because of these shortcomings we have used CMake for new projects for about 
a year. We have made good experience with it. We have now started to port 
all Autotools projects over to CMake.

Please take a look at CMake and consider it before you
start investing time into Autotools.

Best regards,
Thomas