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

[John Anderson]

How about doing option 1 for the common/easy cases, e.g. windows and 
maybe mac and option 2 for the hard/rare cases, e.g. linux. After all, 
linux people are used to having to build their executables and windows 
people are used to having prebuilt binaries.

John

Markku Mielityinen wrote:
> 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
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