[Zlib-devel] configure script

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Mark Adler <madler at madler.net> schrieb:

> No, it's incredibly useful.  The single action of putting in that
> dummy Makefile dramatically reduced the number of emails I received,
> which were coming from clueless people who didn't know about
> configure and didn't read the README file, but did know to type "make".

Hmm, what about an autoresponder just saying "RTFM!" ? ;-o
You could put a big-fat note on the zlib website telling that
./configure has to be run first (as is the de-facto standard for
most OSS packages, even outside the autotools world).

BTW: why do you get that traffic personally, instead of this list ?

> > Which makes it a downstream branch. They'll have to maintain the whole
> > build process (probably including changes on zconf.h) on their own anyways.
> 
> They don't modify zconf.h at all.  It works as is. 

Assuming, the default zconf.h is fine for their platform.
I'm quite sceptical that this works reliably for cases which arent
supported by ./configure.

> The world doesn't always have to be complicated.  Sometimes we just decide
> to make it so.

Crossplatform building/development actually is quite complicated,
unless you dont have an reliable common environment (POSIX was intended
to provide this, but OS vendors, even including GNU, dont tend to be
perfectly compliant ;-o)

> > Okay, simply put the generated tree into git, in its own downstream
> > branch (ontop of master). Takes a few lines of shellscript to do it
> > once and for all, fully automatically.
> 
> I want the master branch to be the one that delivers an archive identical
> to the distribution.

Why ?
It's quite usual that autogenerated files are only in the dist tarballs
and not in the VCS. (which makes perfectly sense, IMHO).

> If you are suggesting that the develop branch not have these files,
> then maybe we can do that.
> Then I have to remember to put them back in just before I promote the master branch.

Well, if you insist on this manual maintenance overhead ... ;-o


cu
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

 phone:  +49 36207 519931  email: weigelt at metux.de
 mobile: +49 151 27565287  icq:   210169427         skype: nekrad666
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Embedded-Linux / Portierung / Opensource-QM / Verteilte Systeme
----------------------------------------------------------------------