Re: [lmi] Building lmi under Linux

[Greg Chicares]

On 2019-09-20 12:23, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
[...]
> 
>  To summarize, I think there are 2 reasonable ways of building lmi under
> Linux:
> 
> 1. The usual one, with installing all the dependencies manually and then
>    running lmi configure, which will pick them up and build lmi itself.
>    For simplicity, this could be done by a single _simple_ wrapper script.
> 
> 2. The lmi one, with all the extra steps done by install_msw.sh and the
>    other install_xxx files used by it, which is far from simple, but has
>    the advantage of being comprehensive.
> 
>  Which one should we pursue? I guess your preference would be (2), but I'd
> prefer to be sure before embarking on all the changes that will be needed
> to replace the existing script doing (1).

I think the present chaos is okay.

For corporate use today, gtk is irrelevant. In the office, lmi
is deployed to msw PCs only. We have a redhat server that we
can access via putty, but AFAICT we can't get it to provide an
X server, so we can't run a (gtk) gui build there--the only
useful thing we do with it is cross-build msw binaries.

I pay little attention to the lmi autotools system. I might use
it myself to build a gtk version of lmi, but nobody in the office
can run that. The nice thing about autotoolization is that it's
likely to work in cases where lmi's own makefiles don't:
 - today, for gtk to run on my machine under debian;
 - tomorrow, perhaps, for BSD
But even for me gtk is a low priority today.

In the future, that could change. For example, someday we may
want to run lmi on a BSD- or GNU/Linux-based OS; or maybe end
users will have ubuntu on msw or whatever they call it now,
and gtk will rule the msw world.