Depending on external libraries

[Egbert Eich]

Daniel Stone writes:
 > 
 > You said 'you guys that are pro-modular-tree', and tried to stuff
 > arguments into our mouth. BTW, running 'jhbuild install xorg', or
 > whatever the single command is, is far easier than hunting down the
 > X.Org tarball, untarring it, working out how the hell you configure
 > host.def/et al, then making it.

Oh, thank you for bringing this up. I would like to take this right back 
to the autotool advocates.
Imake at least offers a nice uniform way of configuration of the
entire X suite. In the modular environment every piece will have its 
own configure options (which you cannot put into a file but have to
specify on the command line!) - largely depending on the maintainers 
preference.
In the past I found the configuration of autotooled projects rather
cumbersome: on quite a few the options changed from version to version.

What is more: as I developer I have been able to more freely among the
different pieces of X without being plagued by the 'boundaries' of the
build system: I had a uniform set of build rules. Now every piece will
be created according to the author's preferences. Some will use automake,
others will create their Makefile.ins directly.
A lot of packages will have the same problem solved in many different
ways. The centralized structure of Imake provided a uniform way of doing
things. If you discovered the way was broken you fixed it in one single
place.

 > > Yes, it requires the builder to made a simple edit to their site.def 
 > > file. In the grand scheme of things, not very complicated at all.
 > 
 > You need to make the right ones, and working out what those right ones
 > are is often difficult.

I think this is a myth. xf86site.def contained a list with a detailed
discription of the most importand ones. People who felt that options 
were missing could have spoken up.

 > > There is no jhbuild on the boxes I cited. Telling me I've got to go get 
 > > it before I can build is a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
 > 
 > Yes, but for the benefits jhbuild with a modular tree provides, it's IMO
 > worth it. jhbuild is also far more flexible, and provies you with a way
 > to build many, many, many components (such as, oh, GNOME), if you want
 > to. It's a common build tool, not an X-specific one.

Looks to me this depends very much on the environemnt somebody is
working in. On Linux people are used to huge chains of tools which
themselves require more meta tools.
I myself find it rather cumbersome to track down problems to the
part of the tool chain that's responsible - especially in an environment
that attempts to do everything automagically.
I feel I'm there to do development not to learn and debug huge build
environments and make them suite my purposes. And I don't want to be
hampered by those problems an blocked from doing my work until I've
convinced some toolchain guru to look into my problem.
To me it looks like we are abandoning the KISS principle here.

Egbert.