[PATCH modular] Implement a classification for scripts using subdirectories

[Dan Nicholson]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Trevor Woerner <twoerner at gmail.com> wrote:
> The following is based on some of my assumptions, feel free to correct
> as need be :-)
>
> If the source tree wasn't so large I assume anyone building the code
> would be expected to download the entire source and run a top-level
> "./configure" and "make" once (like most any other project). I assume
> when the modularization was taking place it was decided to make each
> module shoudl be separate and stand-alone so a developer could work on
> some subset and not have to download the entire source tree.
>
> I assume the reason things like build.sh exist is because there is no
> top-level ./configure script. A top-level configure script would be
> able to sort out the dependencies and build everything in the correct
> order, but it would expect all the code to be available since it would
> need to generate files (e.g. Makefile) everywhere, even in submodules
> which won't get built. So if there were a top-level ./configure script
> it wouldn't be able to run unless all the code were available.
> build.sh is more flexible in this way.
>
> As a thought experiment, if we did use something like cmake would it
> be able to solve the problem of not having to download and have
> available all the code in order to build? Switching each of the
> existing modules to cmake from the autotools wouldn't solve the
> problem of not having a top-level cmake or ./configure script, would
> it? We'd still need something to tie it nicely together and just build
> and download a subset of the available code, no?

Cmake doesn't solve that problem. jhbuild was written explicitly for
this purpose, though (for GNOME originally then more generically).

--
Dan