[Adonthell-devel] Re: Refactoring wished

[Kai Sterker]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Enrico Kochon
<address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Enrico!

> A few weeks passed since I tried to compile and so on, however I found
> it not very convinient, as all the libs where to get installed before
> development was possible.

This can be an issue first, although it should be possible to work
around by appropriate settings of LD_LIBRARY_PATH and friends. This
isn't documented anywhere, however.

Since development mostly changes a single library only, I could so far
live with doing a make install for that single library once in a while
(although it is true that you lose some seconds each compile-debug
cycle).

> Imho, it should be more lightweight. Perhaps
> only one local development directory should suffice. These deployment
> stuff (automake etc.) is great for making packages for distribution, but
> it shouldnt be necessary in this scale for fast development.

It is also great for platform-independence, dependency checking, etc.
... and as an alternative you could use the CMake based build, which
feels a bit faster then the autotools build.

I think the main issue here is not necessarily the build system
(you'll need one to handle a moderately complex source tree and I
believe most would find it convenient). The issue is maybe the source
structure and how we build all those shared libs and as a result that
things tend to work better when installed correctly.


> I would like to contribute, however this barrier hinders me a lot.
> Sorry for my complain, I want to know, which opinion the others have. If
> there were a consense, I would like to try a lightweight
> build-environment. This discussion is not about tools, only about
> manageability.

I believe what would suffice is a shell-script that creates a proper
environment by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PYTHONPATH and maybe one or
two others, then executing whatever test program or script you want to
run. Basically just a thin wrapper that'll execute whatever is passed
into it in a fitting environment.

If you could come up with something like that, that would be much
appreciated by a couple of people I talked to lately :-).

Kai