[asterisk-dev] zaptel, menuselect and autoconf

[Bob Atkins]

It turns out that that I only submitted one bug report 
http://bugs.digium.com/view.php?id=7876 originally on 9/3/06 for the 
v1.2 build issues which was then extended to the v1.4 build issues and 
was left in my court on 3/26/07. I haven't responded because the fixes 
would have been ugly band aids. Proper fixes required a re-design of the 
entire build process and I didn't have the time or resources to do it. 
After performing the work on the original v1.2 Makefiles and having them 
'perfect' for both Solaris as well as other OS builds I was not prepared 
to try and re-engineer the new build process in v1.4 to be portable 
across all operating systems using autoconf alone. I didn't agree with 
the menuselect process in the v1.4 and I didn't want to spend any time 
engineering it out of the build process only to start a big controversy 
and have the work rejected. We just needed the build process for v1.4 to 
work on Solaris and I was completely blown away by the introduction of 
menuselect and its inherent problems. We couldn't even get menuselect to 
compile on Solaris so that pretty much ended its use here and we just 
got the machete out and hacked it out of the build process until we 
could get a v1.4 build to work. The resulting Makefiles are ugly and 
very Solaris specific - something that I would not want to post as a 
potential patch.

I really wish that I could spend the time and resources to engineer a 
solid autoconf build process for asterisk but we are all tapped out. All 
of the 'options' that menuselect handles could easily be incorporated 
into an autoconf process as various build options. Has anyone looked at 
what it takes to build PHP lately? There are a large number of options 
that are handled very well by the autoconf process and make it very 
easily to automate the build process. We use build scripts here that 
wrap the entire build process into a single script that any junior admin 
to could safely run to build most open source packages and even create 
the Solaris specific installation packages. The result is consistent and 
predictable software builds.


Michiel van Baak wrote:
> On 10:01, Tue 31 Jul 07, Bob Atkins 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.
>>     
>
> What are the bugnumbers on bugs.digium.com ?
>   

 

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