[haiku-development] Re: An idea about compiling applications
- From: pulkomandy <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 08:11:15 +0200
> Is there a way to eliminate the need for patches by enhancing the way
> configure behaves so that it knows what function calls to substitute in
> when configure runs?
The idea of configure scripts is more or less that: detecting which
features are available and which compiler flags need to be passed. This
way, only the configure scripts need to be aware of all differences
between platforms, and the remaining parts of the code in the
application ideally wouldn't need any changes.
However, Haiku is one of the systems that are most different from the
usual setup configure scripts are tested on (most likely some kind of
GNU/Linux system). As a result, some of the differences we have aren't
always checked by configure scripts.
Rewriting another tool above configure isn't going to fix this. The
proper solution is to write these patches to configure scripts, and
send them back to the original developers of the software. This raises
awareness of Haiku to other open source projects, and also gives people
more easy to find examples of the right way to do things.
Unfortunately, there is often more work needed than just patching
configure scripts. Most apps will store files in home/.someting instead
of home/config/settings/something, for example. There are many other
small things to change to get an application properly running. This
requires some coding knowledge and I don't think there is a way around
that, and letting people think they could port software without some
coding experience will probably lead to half-finished ports, not quite
up to our quality standards. I think it is better to let people
interested in this learn about at least the configure script macros and
how they are used, so they can know what they do when applying the
fixes.
--
Adrien.
Other related posts:
