Re: [Gnucap-devel] Make2 again

[Felix Salfelder]

Hi Al.

On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 03:39:18PM -0400, al davis wrote:
> What I had in mind is that, at least in concept, autotools and 
> Cmake are ways to generate the Make2/Make3 files, instead of the 
> whole thing, maintaining modularity, maintaining the ability to 
> fall back on the simpler old system of manual configuration.

the fall back to manual configuration is what i tried to approximate
with the (optional) Make2 files.

> There is also the issue of configuration for plugins, which is 
> not addressed now, at all.

if you consider a different plugin configuration useful, tell me which
one. it will be easy to implement a(ny number of)
--with-different-plugin-conf option(s).

> I like to work in small chunks.  If I am working in "apps" for 
> example, I want to work there as if the others didn't exist.

autotools supports this exact sort of fragmentation [1]. the idea is the
following.

$ ./configure; make install # installs everything, including "apps"
or
$ ./configure --disable-apps; make install # installs everything, except "apps"
$ mv apps ..; rm * -rf; cd ../apps
$ ./configure; make # work with apps, as if the others didn't exist.

i have not implemented this for apps or for any of the other
directories, but the mechanism is already working for my own independent
packages (watch out for 'externals' in configure.ac). i could easily add
this to 'apps' some day or other.

> When I split the files up, i tried it with autotools and gave 
> up, reverting to what is essentially plain makefiles.

works like a charm for me. yes, it increases overhead, but it works.

> It's "Make1" that needs to be included.
> Or (like the spice model plugins) Make1  includes the rest.

spice model plugins is one of the plugins i use as an 'external'. there
is no "Make1" involved though.

as a side remark: i think it's useful to be able to attach source files
and let gnucap take care of the compilation, in case the plugin comes as
a single (cc, model, va, ... ) file. for this, no autotools/cmake/...
will be required at all.

cheers
felix

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/html_node/Subpackages.html