Re: Building in a different directory

Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 16:24:19 +0200 (CEST)
From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net>

Ian Lance Taylor writes:

> I normally prefer to build packages in directory other than the source
> directory.

This is supported by the development branch since last week.

Cool.

> For that matter, is there any interest in converting Postgres to use
> automake?

The last time we thought about this we quickly rejected it. A couple of
reasons:

* We don't want to sit and wait for config.status to finish writing its
200+ Makefile's, when we can get away with writing two or three and have
the rest include them.

Fair enough.

* Automake requires using libtool, and libtool doesn't satisfy our needs
yet.

This turns out not to be the case. libtool is independent of
automake.

* Automake doesn't handle building Perl, Python, Tcl, Java code very well.

I've used it for Perl, Tcl and Java. It doesn't provide much
automatic support. But you can just keep the existing rules.

* Automake doesn't handle our documentation format.

Again, you can just keep the existing rules.

* Automake is in many ways too insistent on the GNU standards for our
taste.

automake doesn't really insist on things, as I see it. The defaults
are certainly for the GNU standards. But it's fairly easy to use it
in other ways.

In any case, I think that following the GNU standards need not be a
bad thing. It makes the system more familiar to other developers, and
thus makes it easier for them to contribute. But that is just my
opinion--and I've been using the GNU standards for many years, so I am
clearly biased.

I don't see what it would buy us at this point.

OK.

Generally, we discuss development on pgsql-hackers.

OK, thanks. The mailing list description on
http://www.postgresql.org/mhonarc/pgsql-admin/
led me to think that this was the right list. But I probably just
misread it.

Ian