[OpenAFS-devel] Re: adding "make check" to build slaves

[Russ Allbery]

Jason Edgecombe <jason@rampaginggeek.com> writes:
> On 04/12/2012 02:34 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> runtests itself assumes that something else will handle this, since for
>> all of my other projects I use libtool.  OpenAFS is somewhat unique
>> among projects using that test driver at the moment in its reinvention
>> of that wheel.  (For reasons that I understand; libtool has its bugs
>> too, of course.  But this is something that it normally handles
>> reasonably well with current versions.)

> is there a reason why we shouldn't use libtool? licensing perhaps?

I believe that we should use both Libtool and Automake, but the amount of
work required for a transition is immense, and will also require working
with the upstreams of both projects to resolve bugs.  OpenAFS is more
broadly portable than a lot of free software, and has some interesting and
special build system challenges (such as the separate build of kernel
modules).

I've looked at doing this incrementally a few times, as have other people,
but it's a very difficult change to make incrementally, and the amount of
effort required is daunting.  It's generally far easier to make
incremental improvements to our current ad hoc arrangement of shell
scripts with portability testing on the platforms we know we care about.

Given current available development cycles and current development
priorities, I think this sort of build system transition is unlikely to
ever happen.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>