From kde-core-devel  Tue Jun 14 13:04:37 2005
From: Josef Spillner <spillner () kde ! org>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 13:04:37 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: Build system for KDE4
Message-Id: <200506141504.38587.spillner () kde ! org>
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=111875431819188

Am Dienstag, 14. Juni 2005 14:38 schrieb Guillaume Laurent:
> Honestly, I can understand people arguing on which solution is best to
> replace the autotools, but if you feel you first need to establish that
> they need replacement, you're in serious need of a reality check.

Most of the discussion blurred the line between concepts and implementation. 
For instance the automake syntax is more or less as easy as it can get 
(including the am_edit extensions), and unsermake has shown that it is 
possible to implement a fast parser and makefile.in generator. Now that 
leaves the configure checks, but replacing those will have to be thought of 
carefully as well, including a restructuring of the kde autoconf macros to 
something like:
- check for Qt (incl. version)
- check for KDE (incl. version)
(the 2 above are the only relevant macros for 3rd party projects)
- check for python/ruby/perl/xxx-lang-dev
- check for libraries used in kdelibs
- check for module libraries (like libxine in kde-mm)

There's no use in starting a replacement when afterwards we still have python 
checks in 5 modules, openssl checks in 2 and big-endian-little-endian in 25, 
all without documentation and without reusability.

Josef