Re: suggestion for distribution: mega archive

[Philip Brown <phil bolthole com>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2002 at 11:44:36PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Philip Brown <phil bolthole com> writes:
> > I would like to suggest [... a] mega-archive, with **all** required 
> >libraries beyond a plain X11R6 distribution, with a single top level 
> >configure script.
> ...
> The reason it's hard is that you have to make sure pango/atk will link
> to a GLib that hasn't been installed yet, and gtk+ will link to a
> pango/atk/glib that hasn't been installed yet. Makefile hell.

Well, I see (at least) two ways around that:

a) The quick hack method:
   have a wrapper script, rather than a global configure, that
   sequentially compiles and installs glib, then configures and
   installs all the other stuff as needed.
   Not entirely "clean", but still makes life a LOT easier for folks.
   (If you were really fancy, you might even have the wrapper check for
     "if [ -x $prefix/lib/libglib-samerev ] ; then
         skip-glib-build
      fi"
   :-)



b) The way I think might make more sense:

   Most of the reason you "need" the stuff installed, is so that
   you can run xyz-config to find out what the include paths are
   for your dependancies, so that you can compile the "current"
   library. But the way I understand it, once you have compiled
   pango, it doesnt need to know where glib is any more, and
   once you have compiled gtk, it doesnt need to know where pango is any
   more, etc.

   SO: for the mega-archive, use some special --with-xyz-path=$PWD/xxx
   to configure, so that it knows where to -Ixxx -L... without having to
   worry about the "installed" problem.

   (but do a double path at link time. eg
     $(CC) -L$builddir/xyz -R$builddir/xyz \
       -L$installprefix/lib -R $installprefix/lib 
   )

   Or some variation on that theme. Like set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to $BUILD/lib