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

[Reid Ellis]

I would add Ubuntu 386 to the  common/easy cases.

Reid

On Jun 16, 2006, at 20:57, John Anderson wrote:
> 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.