[Chandler-dev] A discussion about how to ship external tools that are needed in the development of Chandler

[Markku Mielityinen]

Hi all,

I, Bear, and Heikki were just discussing how to distribute the tools 
that are required in the development of Chandler. These tools include, 
but are not limited to, gettext and wx tools/utils. In this discussion 
we came up with two approaches that we want to present for public criticism.

1) We make a new build target that downloads prebuilt binaries of the 
tools much in the same way as "make DEBUG=0" downloads prebuilt binaries 
of Chandler. This approach is fast but on the other hand  consideration 
is needed to copy the right distribution for all platforms, and as the 
number of different platforms that we need to support increases so does 
the burden of maintenance. The obvious weakness is that in Linux (and 
other "you should compile it yourself" environments) binaries are not 
always portable even between different versions of the same 
distribution. Hence, the number or required prebuilt binaries may turn 
out to be too large to handle.

2) We obtain sources from all the required external tools and place them 
in external/ folder from which they are compiled and installed as part 
of "make world" or some other build target. By installation I mean that 
the obtained executables are placed so that they are accessible without 
a need to copy files or alter path manually. This approach adds bloat to 
the project but on the other hand we can be sure that the tools work on 
all target platforms.

3) Is the a better way to do this?

We hope to hear your input before Tuesday, as we need to start 
implementing this soon.

Cheers,
    Markku