On Fri, 17 Sep 1999, Alan Barrett wrote:

> I think it would be good if we were compatible with FreeBSD.

I've had a look at our build system a couple of times now, and have
basically come to the conclusion that building in the source tree,
rather than in the object tree, has problems that just can't be
overcome.

The biggest problem is storage of configuration information for
the build. Currently this stuff goes in variables in the environment
or /etc/mk.conf, which makes it very easy to make mistakes that
change the build configuration. (Just typing `make' in the wrong
window will do it--needless to say this is very bad when you're
making a release!) In addition, having two developers share a single
source tree is pretty problamatic at the moment.

What I would prefer to see is a program that one runs, giving it
the location of the source and object trees, that generates an
appropriate set of files in the object tree to hold all build and
configuration information. I had a basic version of this working
at one point, and well over 90% of the source tree compiled this
way without problems. I haven't spent the time to deal with some
of the more sophisticated weirdness in some of our makefiles.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson  <cjs@cynic.net>   917 532 4208   De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.
The most widely ported operating system in the world: http://www.netbsd.org