I know this has been discussed before, but as Argyll currently stands
there are two complains from Linux users:
JAM, whatever its merits, is an alien tool for most Linux users, who are
used to a standard ./configure && make && make install process for
source-based packages.
Well, a lot of projects are a "scratch your own itch" type of
thing, and some peoples itches are different from others.
./configure & make are fine if you're on unix type machines,
but not everybody is, nor are they prepared to load unix tools
onto their MSWindows box. As a set of tools to maintain
a build system, I find little to recommend them, so I'm
not prepared to invest in the effort to switch to something
else at this stage, unless it is really worthwhile. 99% of all
the build tools out there have simply got it wrong - they all
seem to take a top down approach, rather than a dependency out approach.
The only build system I've come across with half a clue is odin,
and it is UNIX only. Maybe it's time to take a scan through all
the alternative again, to see if any have finally figured it out...
The alternative is to sit down for six months, and write
a build system, rather than a color management system. But this
is unlikely to address the issue of Jam being regarded as an alien tool
on some systems.
> The other complaint is that the source Zip file has no top-level
> directory, which has caused more than one of us to expand a load of
> hard-to-identify files into our home directories!
It's hard to suite everyone. I personally get terribly irritated
by archives having some long, hard to type top level directory
embedded in them, when I've already created a nice, easy to type directory
for the project to live in :-) At least with .zip it's easy to do an
unzip -l and see that the file is not about to overwrite /.
Automatically uses system-wide libtiff. (Reduced tarball size by
removing built-in libtiff)
Creates Argyll's libraries as shared, and links the tools with them
(reduces overall footprint)
Installs reference targets and charts in $PREFIX/share/argyll/
Again it's all trade-offs. I went for making it as bullet proof as possible,
rather than letting people scratch around finding the right
dependencies. It does make for duplication though. When I note the
difficulties people have building gimp on MSWindows, I think I made
the right decision.
But of course one of the features of open source, is that people can
cook it up the way they want it.
