[asterisk-dev] zaptel, menuselect and autoconf

[Kristian Kielhofner]

On 7/31/07, Bob Atkins <bob at digilink.net> wrote:
>
>  The issues you bring up with menuselect in terms of automating the build process is why we ripped it out completely from the v1.4 build process. We just replace the Makefile with our own which is actually a derivative of the v1.2 Makefile that we corrected quite some time ago to support building properly on Solaris systems but the corrections were never accepted when we submitted them.
>
>  A 'standard' autoconf build process would make life for everyone much simpler however, we found that autoconf was not implemented in a portable manner in v1.4 either - important compile options were not being passed down to subordinate builds so everything would break during the build process. We also reported this problem in another bug report with suggested fixes but that report also died quietly as well.
>
>  Basically, we just end up doing our own thing.
>
>

  I have had the same issues building with AstLinux.

  As has been pointed out before menuselect is not friendly for
scripts or Makefiles.  I don't understand why we need it at all.
There are already several different ways to build complicated software
on *NIX systems.

  IMHO if "straight" autoconf/automake is good enough for something
like Apache it should be good enough for Asterisk too.  Just looking
at the output from configure in Apache2 shows a build system that is
much more capable, flexible, and scriptable (some might also say
simpler) than the current combination in Asterisk - with many, many
more modules and options available to the user.  All of this with no
build time dependencies on mxml, etc.

  Tzafrir's --with-modules is very Apache-like (--enable-modules) :).
Granted his is for zaptel, but I'd like to see it in everything.

  Even Kconfig as used with the Linux kernel would be better than menuselect.

-- 
Kristian Kielhofner