coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Philip Allison <mangobrain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hullo list, and in particular hello Mr. Serack!
This is a fantastic project idea, but I worry about the concept of
maintaining "shallow forks", and having to maintain two build
infrastructures for a project: one for UNIX (my personal choice being
autotools), and one for the CoApp build environment.  It may simply be
too early to expect good answers to this sort of question, but is the
plan to somehow piggy-back off of existing build scripts, by - for
example - scanning configure.ac, Makefile.am et al and producing at
least a skeleton of CoApp build script?  This begs for some other
questions, such as what *is* a CoApp build script anyway?  I assume it
is a Visual Studio project file, but I've done very little
professional development on the Windows side of the fence.
I'm under no illusion that such automatic generation would be simple,
since the autotools are notoriously difficult to use "correctly" (with
frequent differences of opinion regarding what constitutes
correctness), but I also think it would be a mistake to expect
developers to maintain multiple build systems; IMHO that is one of the
biggest problems with porting as it currently stands.  "Shallow
forking" presumably entails third parties - people other than the
original project developers, perhaps analogous to package maintainers
in the Linux world - creating and maintaining CoApp build scripts on a
project's behalf, but it strikes me that such work is best done by
people who really know the code they're trying to build, and that it
goes beyond what I for one would consider the remit of a package
maintainer.

I'm no expert, but I am currently working on a cross-platform project
which makes heavy use of shared libraries and plugins, using the
autotools (including libtool) to build using native tools on Linux and
MinGW on Windows.  The configure.ac and assorted Makefile.am files are
not easy to get right, and having to recreate their function from
scratch for a different set of tools - then maintain both over time -
would be somewhat daunting.

Looking forward to your answers, even if the surface can only be
scratched at this stage. :)

Regards,
Phil