On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Greg A. Woods wrote:

: It is the makefiles and build system that pretends to look normal, but
: then sucks in its sources from a foreign directory that I'm suggesting
: is evil, ugly, inelegant, hard to debug, a pain to write (sometimes),
: etc.

`Your opinion.'  I've found that many (most) developers find it far more
elegant than frobbing sources to make them look different from a `vanilla'
distribution.

: I did a lot of work upgrading all the stuff in /usr/src/contrib

We don't have a contrib, because we don't want to pull in such gargantuan
things as perl; that's what pkgsrc is for.

: The *2netbsd scripts are indeed, by evidence of hard-won experience, the
: most elegant way of actually integrating a piece of contributed software
: into a source tree,

Again, `your opinion.'

: Sometimes such scripts aren't even necessary -- just import, merge, and
: go.

The complete annoyance with these scripts stems from the fact that they do
patching/changing of files *before* they get imported.  The point of
reachover builds is that you can Just Import the sources, and if a new file
appears in the distrib, just add it to SRCS= in the makefile.  (Both systems
require a check of the config/#define options necessary to compile the
package, so that is no different.)

: Maybe if the build system was not based no a recursive make system, then
: it would be OK to do VPATH-like things to pull sources from non-local
: directories (actually it would be mandatory!).

src/gnu/usr.bin/{gas.ld}.new work fine for me; in fact,
src/gnu/lib/libstdc++ uses a recursive make system and .PATH, and works
great.  Why is it not OK?

: Recursive make systems also lend the impression that make can be easily
: bypassed by running commands directly.

Uh, `whatever.'  There's a Makefile there for a reason.  (!)

: Segregation of source by copyright doesn't necessarily break the
: implications of a recursive make system, but using VPATH mechanisms to
: pull sources into a build directory certainly does.

Not bloody likely.  It has been working since the early days of NetBSD; what
broke now?

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)