Re: autotoolizing xen?

[Jacob Gorm Hansen <jacobg@diku.dk>]

Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2005, Tobias Hunger wrote:
> 
> 
>>I was wondering what the general opinion on autotoolizing xen is? I am
>>volunteering to do so, if there is interest in updating the build system
>>to use autoconf, automake and/or libtool.
> 
> 
> oh, please don't do this. I do not like those things at all. 

I agree, please do not go down that road. Look at 'GNU helloworld' for 
an (extreme) example of how horibbly bloated this will make your 
software. On my Gentoo box the configure scripts often take longer to 
run than the actual build of the software itself.

Instead, use a better build system. I am using Jam (which is public 
domain) for my stuff, and that works perfectly, and the build 
specifications are a lot simpler that the xen Makefiles.

For example, here is my Jamfile for tools/libxc:

--------------------------------------------
SubDir TOP tools libxc  ;

SubDirHdrs $(TOP) tools libxutil ;

Library libxc :
xc_atropos.c
xc_bvtsched.c
xc_domain.c
xc_evtchn.c
xc_io.c
xc_linux_build.c
xc_linux_restore.c
xc_linux_save.c
xc_misc.c
xc_physdev.c
xc_plan9_build.c
xc_private.c
xc_rrobin.c
;
--------------------------------------------

Contrast that with corresponding Makefile, and you will see how much 
simpler the Jamfile is. Jam also handles all the tedious stuff like 
header-dependencies without littering your tree with .dep files, and 
having it output target files to a separate build-directory (which once 
you've tried it you will never want to live without, saves you a lot of 
'make clean's) is trivial, just set a single variable at the top level.

Some really big commercial code bases use Jam. If you look at the 
'Jamming' mailing list archives you will find build-masters from very 
well known software companies on there. Personally I have used it to 
build a game which retailed more than 3 million copies, on four very 
different platforms.

Jacob


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