dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <johanjan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 10:22:02AM -0500, Anders Logg wrote:
> Great!
> 
> We should probably use libtool to build all libraries.
> 
> Or we could look at Matt's BuildSystem and rewrite the whole build
> with that. (But we have plenty to do without breaking the build so I
> suggest we wait for some time...)
> 
> /Anders
> 

Yes, now PyDOLFIN has reached a stable state. It can be installed with
"python setup.py install" just like any module, so now we should be
able to depend on it from other scripts (like the demos).

I definitely think we should move to BuildSystem eventually. I've been
fighting with autoconf a bit lately, and I started to question its
design. But this is from the manual:

   "Naturally, you might then think of shell scripts; who needs
autoconf? A set of properly written shell functions is enough to make
it easy to write configure scripts by hand. Sigh!  Unfortunately,
shell functions do not belong to the least common denominator;
therefore, where you would like to define a function and use it ten
times, you would instead need to copy its body ten times.

   So, what is really needed is some kind of compiler, autoconf, that
takes an Autoconf program, `configure.ac', and transforms it into a
portable shell script, configure."

If you can't even assume shell functions exist, then that's the
explanation why autoconf looks the way it does. It's a great tool for
extreme portability, but DOLFIN can probably safely restrict itself to
the platforms which have a Python interpreter (for example), without
leaving any interested users out.

But we can continue with autoconf for the time being, after fighting
with it for some time at least you learn it pretty well..

  Johan