xserver build failling AFTER it works ??

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 08:59:22PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
[...]

> Like I said, it's doing driver/xf86-video-cyrix/src.

the best thing is to comment out the line starting the cyrix driver build.
this will get your build going and won't bother you too much (unless you need
this driver). The next thing would be to file a bug against the cyrix driver.

> > That's what build.sh is.  If this is insufficient for your needs, we'd
> > happily point to your alternate version. :)
> 
> No, actually, it's not.  A correctly built make would scan it's list of
> products, most especially their build times, and after comparing those build
> times with the time stamps on the source files, only rebuild those items where
> the sources are more newly modified than the products.  In other words, it's
> intelligent about what it rebuilds.  

the modularisation resulted in a lot of independent components. you can
rebuild (and release) one component without requiring the rebuild of any other
components.
this feature is both praised and criticised, but regardless of that it's what
we have until somebody opts to fix it. I believe there are a number of
alternative build scripts floating around, egbert had one at one point and
pcpa too. Maybe others. And of course there is the jhbuild moduleset.

build.sh is simply a script that connects these independent  
components to save you typing autogen.sh 100 times.

> Another way to look at this is, your present tool rebuilds either everything, or
> you need to manually tell it what directory to start from, then it rebuilds
> everything from that point on.  Instead, I could have it inspect all of the
> auto-tool derived files, and only do the autogen.sh stuff if needed, then do a
> make that doesn't automatically clean and rebuild everything.  Rebuilding from
> scratch is something that only folks who really don't understand building do ...
> or, occaisonally, a developer gets their sources DO screwed up, that to have
> faith, they want a distclean, but that's a rare thing, in a well designed system.

the point of modularisation is that once you built it once, you really only
need to re-build those modules that you changed. so you can assume that if you
do a code modification or a git pull, you have to do a make.
with few exceptions, this worked fine for me for the last years.
 
> There are things for DocBook that are more well-developed, and the DocBook tools
> are far and away more generally well supported and the subject of a far greater
> development audience.  And, theyu just happen to be less biased towards a single
> OS.  Everybody seems to support DocBook.  Look, in fact, at the list of editors
> that produce DocBook documentation directly, versus those that produce LinuxDoc
> (if, in fact, you can find any).

AFAIK, recent documentation efforts have used the docbook format. As usual,
there isn't nearly enough work done in this area but the ML archives would
probably spit out a discussion or two where docbook xml was listed as
preferred format.

Cheers,
   Peter