Depending on external libraries

[Keith Packard]

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I believe we've discovered that what we should support is an environment
which lets people choose where to find external libraryes -- whether to
include known-working versions from known-stable locations or whether to
use already installed versions.  We can't make everyone happy with a 
static set of source modules.

I believe this means that the current system isn't sufficient, and that we 
need something in addition to (or in place of) either imake or autotools.

So, we need some additional mechanism or tool that will help people select 
the right sources for each library.

As usual, we get to choose between 'build' or 'buy'. Jhbuild does most of
what we need here, we could easily set up a few different configurations to
let people choose where the external libraries came from.  The reason I've
been suggesting jhbuild is that I'm lazy and willing to place a burden on
people with ancient systems to save myself work.

For us, once python is installed, things are actually easier than with 
the existing xc/extras tree as we don't need to do anything at all to 
update the external libraries; just copy a known working tarball onto our 
file server and people using the 'X.org blessed' versions will get them 
automatically.

I think we can all agree that the people we most need to satisfy with our
build system is ourselves.  Not that we shouldn't strive to make things 
reasonably friendly for other people, but twisting ourselves in 
contortions to reduce the work needed for the casual CVS downloader just 
isn't a good use of our time.

And spending time converting new versions of external libraries to use 
imake certainly falls under the 'contortions' heading in my book.

-keith



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