Re: autotoolizing xen?

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

Anthony Liguori wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 13:20, Jacob Gorm Hansen wrote:
> 
>>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.
> 
> 
> I've used Jam before with Boost.  It can get quite nasty (if you try to
> be portable and include a version of Jam, you've got a nasty chicken and
> the egg problem).

Most of the major distros (at least debian and gentoo) now come with jam 
binaries, so that is not as much of a problem today, but the Jam source 
is very small and it would not be impossible to include it as part of 
the source tree.

Anyway, I did a fairly thorough investigation of the whole build-system 
scene a few years ago, and back then my conclusion was that while Jam is 
not perfect, it is lightyears ahead of make in speed and portability 
(make will basically not work on a non-unix box, because all Makefiles 
tend to rely heavily on tools such as sed and awk), and is both faster 
and easier to use than other make replacements such as Ant and SCons.

The linux 2.6 build system is also an option. At least it seems a lot 
better than the 2.4 version.

I agree that not being able to build Xen without having xlibs is kind of 
silly. When I emerged twisted it ended up dragging in freetype and most 
of Gnome as well! But maybe the solution is to just not include ioemu in 
the Xen tree until such dependencies are cleaned up, rather than trying 
to fix the problem in the build system.

Jacob


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