Repositioning the KDE Brand -- v-- Build from source [LWN.net]

Repositioning the KDE Brand -- v-- Build from source

Posted Dec 3, 2009 20:39 UTC (Thu) by brianomahoney (subscriber, #6206)
In reply to: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News) by foom
Parent article: Repositioning the KDE Brand (KDE.News)

No, once again nonsense:

What I am really tired of is the 3-4 major sub-projects that an Open-Source distribution depends on eg: (1) KDE (2) Mozilla (3) OOO (4) Java/Mono which seem unable to (a) package their source, (b) provide a convenient build system, (c) list dependancies realistically.

I am all for innovation but do we really need UNDOCUMENTED uses of autoX, libtool, cmake, ant, python 'pyXXX' and many more ... all of which don't come outr of a SVN or GIT download and neet to be stitched together by hand with pre, co and postrequisites before you can say 'make' or whatever?

NO, this is sloppy junk, and BTW Google should stop adding to this mess with Chrome and Android.

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Repositioning the KDE Brand -- v-- Build from source

Posted Dec 4, 2009 1:11 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Well, for KDE and Mozilla your points are wholly baseless.

The build system for Mozilla is a pretty boring Autoconf/Automake thing,
and has some (rather out of date) documentation. The build system for KDE
4 has lots and lots of docs (let's ignore the brittle KDE3
edge-of-the-Autoconf-world build system, it's dead).

The cmake and autoconf-driven build systems of Mzilla and KDE4 are
definitely convenient: fire and forget, literally. (Mozilla's problem here
is that a lot of its configure flags actually break the system if you turn
them on: I don't know why they're available. But the defaults work. KDE
doesn't have this problem.)

My autobuilder scripts for both KDE and Mozilla are less than two dozen
lines. (Of course this excludes the parts that do the ordinary boring
configure && make && make install stuff that most packages need. This is
KDE/Mozilla-specific stuff). So the build system is definitely not much
less conveneint than that of other packages.

Both Mozilla and KDE list their dependencies: KDE does so, again, to an
almost insane length. If you can't find it (three whole clicks from the
KDE front page) and can't work out the deps by consulting the source, you
probably shouldn't be trying to build directly from the VCS.

Your belief that generated files like configure scripts et al should be
stored in version control systems disagrees with that of everyone working
on free software projects I've ever talked to, and betrays a definite lack
of experience in the area. Generated files should not, ever, go into
VCSes, even if it adds dependencies: only the developers need such
dependencies, and the generated files will rapidly lead yo into conflict
hell.

Now, OOo is a sodding nightmare, I'll agree with that. Any project that
ends up producing forks just to fix the *build system* is in a bad way.