decisions on building infrastructure

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, Jun 05, 2003 at 10:40:34AM +0100, Alastair Reid wrote:
> This is what I'm aiming for with the fptools infrastructure
>  (see fptools/libraries/X11 in CVS)
> 
> I'm successfully building several libraries off a single fptools CVS copy.
> 
> Some of the remaining issues are:
> 
> 1) I'd like source distributions to be reasonably complete so, for now, 
>     I plan to include a complete copy of fptools in each tarfile.  Ideally, 
>     this would become a separate package (probably called fpconfig) but
>     this requires us to choose a standard place where fpconfig is installed
>    so that the makefiles can refer to it.  (Hmmm, or fpconfig includes a
>    program /usr/bin/fpconfig-info which returns the necessary information?)
> 
> 2) You need to provide your own copies of:
> 
>     $top/Makefile
>     $top/mk/version.mk
>     $top/mk/boilerplate.mk
>     $top/mk/target.mk
> 
>    Ideally, there'd be just one or two files
>    (I think this can be achieved fairly easily.  I'm at the stage where I'm
>    so glad anything works at all that I lost the energy to push further.)

That's the sort of thing I had in mind.  Ideally the author would write
a minimal definitions.mk containing only make variable settings specific
to the library, and the build system would supply a script that invoked
make on a generic Makefile that included definitions.mk in the middle.