Re: gnomes gtk+/glib fails VPATH install

[Gary V Vaughan <garyv aethos co uk>]

On Wed, Feb 18, 1998 at 10:38:45 +0000, I <Gary> wrote:
Gary> It occurs to me that headers are implicitly architecture
Gary> dependent anyway, rendering this a non-issue.

On Mon, Feb 23, 1998 at 12:10:01AM -0700, Tom Tromey <Tom> wrote:
Tom> Most headers are not implicitly architecture dependent.  Many headers
Tom> are perfectly architecture independent.  That is why includedir is
Tom> under prefix and not exec-prefix.

On Mon, Feb 23, 1998 at 01:08:34PM +0000, I <Gary>  wrote:
Gary> To start the ball rolling here is my proposal to allow
Gary> autoconf/automake built packages to cooperate in maintaining
Gary> architecture independance (there are forward references, so you
Gary> probably need to read this twice to follow it):
Gary> 
Gary> [overly complicated packaging description elided]
Gary> 
Gary> There are problems with this (when multiple prefix directories are
Gary> used for example), but it is a start.

One really big hole I have just spotted (hopefully before anyone else!) is
that headers also implicitly rely on matching libraries so heavily that
trying to determine which headers are architecture independent seems like a
waste of time... if you gotta get the libraries for another machine, trying
to figure out which headers you can share (automatically or otherwise) is
far more difficult and error-prone (eg. think "version numbers") that
getting the matching headers at the same time.

I think that the crux of my argument is: although _technically_ most headers
may be architecture independant, their tight coupling with a matching library
and zero or more architecture dependant headers is such that they are best
regarded as architecture dependant in _actuallity_ (at least until some way
to easily break this coupling is available).

I'm leaning back towards selective preinstall preprocessing...

Cheers,
	Gary.
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