Re: [lmi] [PATCH] Allow installing wxWidgets from GitHub

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 01:39:08 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> I've amused myself by paying homage
GC>   http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lmi/2015-05/msg00001.html
GC> to alt.bad.clams

[OT: that's a first USENET mention I see since a long, long time. And, of
 course, it's an alt.* group. Weeds survive best.]

GC> First of all, let me verify what I think are the underlying assumptions.
GC> GitHub provides convenient tarballs, and all we have to do is provide
GC> the SHA sum in a URL, e.g.:
GC>   https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/archive/SHA_sum_here
GC> The contents are the same as what we'd get by cloning
GC>   https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets.git
GC> and doing 'git archive', specifying the same SHA sum. They must do
GC> this on the fly, because there are so many commits--that's clever, and
GC> useful.

 Yes, exactly.

GC> They don't, I suppose, deliver '.tar.*' tarballs,

 No, they don't. At least it doesn't appear anywhere in the web UI and my
naive attempts to just replace .zip with .tar[{.gz,.bzip2}] didn't succeed.

GC> Arguably the SHA sum is enough, and the tarball's md5sum is unneeded,
GC> but I'm glad you left it in--I prefer to keep it just in case.

 I left it mostly because I wanted to minimize the amount of changes, but
I'm not really sure if it's a good idea to check MD5 of the downloaded ZIP.
It's enough for GitHub to switch to a different ZIP library (or even a
different compression level) to invalidate all of them and I don't see any
good reason to assume that they will never do it, these archives are
ephemeral. OTOH so far they haven't changed their way of generating them
AFAIK, so this is all rather theoretic.

GC> Probably the only interesting change I've made is
GC>     ifneq "$(origin wx_md5)" "$(origin wx_commit_sha)"
GC> in order to make it possible to use only one conditional section;
GC> but that won't survive if I build in overriding values.

 What value does using origin bring here? In principle there is nothing
wrong in doing "wx_commit_sha=xxx make wx_md5=yyy", but this would fail
this test. Granted, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to do it like
this, but why forbid it?

 Other than that I don't have any comments about the patch.

 BTW, while you're looking at the makefiles I'd like to ask if you'd be
interested in the patches refactoring them to try to reuse more code among
them. Notably, I'd like to put the make fragments for downloading
zip/tar.gz/tar.bz2 files in a single place and just use them from
elsewhere because I was rather annoyed that I had to repeat them once again
in the wxPdfDocument installation makefile.

 Thanks,
VZ