Build system

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hiya,

It's been all day I've been trying to add perl bindings to gedit, and I
must say that our build system sucks when dealing with self-contained
applications:

1. we simply ignore the existence of the auto-tools - which is not bad,
since they are the spawn of evil as we all know but we also ignore the
existence of pkg-config, which is a bad thing(tm)

2. perl installation scheme sucks bigtime - come on, three possible
schemes depending on a variable? where the hell I'm supposed to search
for headers, typemaps and whatever if I can't use ExtUtils::Depends?

3. we need code auto-generation a-la-pygtk.  I can't constantly write XS
files in applications where the API changes more frequently than
libraries.

4. I don't remember point four, but it'll come to mind eventually.

Wrapping up libraries is a no-brainer, thanks to the work done by all
the gtk-perl developers; but when it comes to adding a binding support
to applications like Epiphany and Gedit, which do not have a nice and
clean plugin library, everything becomes very, *very* messy.

In order to making life of plugin writers a little bit easier, we would
need at least to address points 1 and 2; adding a pkg-config file to the
binding libraries, pointing to the C headers and Perl typemaps would
increase the ability to actually use the bindings code outside the
library case - and also would make ExtUtils::Depend go away, now that I
think of it.

Comments? LARTs?

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi - <ebassi gmail com>
Log: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net