On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 15:31:38 +0200 Enrico Tröger enrico.troeger@uvena.de wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jun 2008 13:28:03 +0100, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
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One thing I've thought about is just to have a single configure.in for all plugins, with some way to tell ./configure which plugins to build, perhaps a way to only build one or a named set to build. This might have the advantage of a single config.h and translation support. The disadvantage might not be important - that to build you have to have all the plugins on disk, you can't just checkout a single plugin folder. If you have an option like
This would mean every plugin loose it's own (autotools) build system and so they loose some of their independence. Might be not a problem, but maybe though.
But only plugins that wanted to use a common build system would use it, it wouldn't affect those that just wanted SVN. It's only useful so we could do official geany-plugins releases.
If we did a geany-plugins release, we could make a release branch, named after the Geany version it's compatible with, and only include plugins that want the common build system in the .tar.gz.
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With your approach, it is not possible to use single translation catalogs the resulting po files for each plugin, AFAIK. Using a single
Yes, that's what I intended for plugins wanting a common build system.
top-level configure.in would mean that we have only one top-level po dir, with one catalog for all plugins. But after all, this is a big advantage as it eases maintainability and especially heavily reduces the necessary work of translators as there is only one file to translate. (assuming loosing plugin's independence is not a problem)
If independence is wanted - e.g. for a plugin that is unusually large or has a specific niche appeal - e.g. for a certain programming language, then I would recommend it just didn't use the common build system.
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plugins can be done, but probably a distro could just say some big plugin that should be separate depends on the geany-plugins package, which has the message catalogs for it. Or even have a common message catalog for most plugins, and any that want a separate one can do so, just don't add to the common POTFILES.in.
I think the message catalogs aren't a real problem for distros but rather the plugin's dependencies. In Debian, maintainers recently solved such issues in some packages with some kind of soft dependencies. The package itself doesn't depend on all necessary libs for each plugin, only for the really necessary ones. For instance, a geany-plugins package in Debian would depend on GTK and Geany, as these are essentially necessary (obviously). But the package would not depend on gtkspell (geanyvc plugin) or aspell (spellcheck plugin). Instead the package only "suggests" these dependencies to tell the user there are dependencies which are necessary to get everything fully working. As long as gtkspell isn't installed the geanyvc wouldn't load in Geany but Geany as well as the other plugins are not affected by this and so working as usual. Maybe the geanyvc plugin is not the best example as the gtkspell dependency is optional but I think it's clear enough. No idea how other distros handle this.
Hmm, I hadn't thought about this - I think having extra plugins depend on geany-plugins is OK though. It would be wise to keep any plugins with unusual dependencies out of the common build system though.
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I feel cautious about using something other than autotools. Yes, it's ugly. But Python is quite a big dependency for a lightweight application - although users installing binary packages wouldn't need
I never wanted to say, we *will* use Waf or anything else which would need many dependencies. I just like Waf and I mentioned it as an example. And I agree, autotools are generally good in portability issues and finding workarounds for differences on different platforms. Anyway, it's still not nice to use.
it. I'm guessing it also depends on a Bourne shell, so with Python as
I don't think it depends on any shell, I guess it's all done with Python internals.
OK, maybe. I guess there must be a way to set CFLAGS on the Windows command prompt ;-)
well it adds another barrier to Windows development - I think if we
I actually didn't use Python on Windows yet but I don't think it's a real barrier. The real barrier on Windows is mingw and everything around, read: a build environment. But except we start to use Visual Studio or something, we won't get around this. It's Windows.
Yes, we can't get around it. I guess Python isn't more difficult than MSYS to install. Probably easier, but bigger.
Another issue is portability to non-Linux systems - autotools is a good choice for this reason because it is well documented and for
I hate its documentation but that's another topic :D.
Well, it's documented in howtos outside the official docs as well.
problems like linking the socket library on Solaris, the solution can be found quite easily just by searching the net. Also probably there are libc problems that autotools works around.
Most other build systems do this as well (cmake, scons, ...).
I thought one of the major speed slowdowns in running configure were all the compiling tests that are needed to see if libc/cc works as expected. But I haven't tried the other systems.
To sum it up: I'm not against any autotools based solution, I just won't work it myself.
Fair enough, but I think it's probably the best choice.
Regards, Nick