jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) (08/19/88)
Two more notes on user-contributed software: Please keep all filenames to 12 or fewer characters (including extensions such as ".c"). Otherwise you will not be portable (we say 12 so that people can have two characters to use with a source code control systems) If possible, please provide Imakefiles. These two, combined with using X11/Xos.h go a long way towards making X programs run on a variety of different platforms. Jim Fulton MIT X Consortium
becker@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Tim Becker) (08/19/88)
If possible, please provide Imakefiles. I don't like to use Imakefiles. We like to RCS all src we install. Furthermore, after the installation all the *.[coh], etc files get removed. (There are good reasons for this (besides disk space), but this isn't the space to articulate them in). So, I don't have a fully populated X11 src tree sitting around. Thus, Imakefiles are difficult to use when building just one piece of X11 s/w. I understand the usefulness of the Imakefile system at build time. It works great at allowing me to tailor the build for my specific site. However, when I build code after the initial X11 installation, I want to link against the installed library's and include the installed header files. I don't want to go looking in $(TOP)/.... for these. How can we meet these two needs together? Tim Becker. becker@cs.rochester.edu
jim@EXPO.LCS.MIT.EDU (Jim Fulton) (08/19/88)
The problem is that Makefiles are not portable and are horrendous to maintain. But, there is nothing at all wrong with providing sample Makefiles along with the Imakefiles. In general, most people will only generate Makefiles once, and imake frees you from having to edit them to cope with the details of your system. It seems to me that wanting to build against the installed header and libraries rather than the ones in the build tree is a separate issue from whether or not people provide Imakefiles. If anything though, I would think that Imakefiles would be helpful to you since you could tailor the Imake.tmpl and Imake.rules files in ./util/imake.includes/ to do what you want and then regenerate the Makefiles.... Jim