Re: Making gnustep libs in a buildroot

[Nicola Pero]

Hi Stephen,

> > ... but the first question I would ask you is - ignoring RPMs for now -
> > can you build all of your libraries on a clean system with a single
> > top-level 'make' command ?
> >
> > If you can't, then you need to fix that first. :-)
> 
> That's part of the problem. The first lib is in package 'A', the second in 
> package 'B', and the third and fourth in 'A'. Each depends on all the ones 
> before it.

Ok - I'm not sure about the details of the organization of your package
etc I won't enter into the details <please mail again if you have a
specific question> :-) but - as a general approach - I still would
recommend making compilation very simple and linear first.

RPM is just yet another user building and installing your package from
sources :-)  if the build process is simple and linear for all users, it
will be simple and linear for RPM too :-)

You may end up spending more effort into building and maintaining RPMs,
DEBs and other packages (and answering user queries) on top of a
complicated build process than simplifying the build process in the first
place.


> > Once this is done, I think making an RPM out of all the libraries at once,
> > using the default gnustep-make support for RPM should automatically work
> > out of the box (or your own hand-made support, it doesn't matter).
> 
> Are you saying that by having a single top-level makefile (aggregate 
> project?), this would put the two lower-level libraries into the one rpm? If 
> so that's pretty cool, but I didn't think that was going to be possible.

Yes - I am saying precisely that :-)

If you have a single top-level makefile which is an aggregate project, and
you make things so that typing 'make' there just works, then putting
PACKAGE_NAME etc there will build a RPM which includes everything.

This is not necessarily the best solution in all cases, but from what you
say it looks like might be appropriate in your case.