[Asterisk-Dev] Dev call 1.2 release discussion

[Matt Fredrickson]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 01:40:41PM -0700, Luigi Rizzo wrote:
> On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 03:31:51PM -0500, Brian West wrote:
> > Autoconf and pals have been offered up twice totally working and they  
> > were going to help maintain it.. but in the usual fashion Digium and  
> > gang ran that guy off.
> 
> the point is not having the working when they come, or for a while,
> but to be sure that there is widespread knowledge on how to maintain
> them so when the guru in charge disappears someone else can take over.
> 
> To this, there is nothing like good documentation and easy and
> stable tools.

Yeah, the trick is not in getting a single person that will maintain it, but
in that whatever build system that is used has to be acceptable enough to a majority
of the developers that actually contribute code that they are willing to
use it.  I'm not certain that there are enough core developers familiar
with auto* tools right now (or want to become familiar enough with them) to
attempt some sort of migration to them.

My personal view on the matter is that the autotools are not a very good
answer.  We were considering this at one time in the past so I ended up
buying a book to learn the various GNU Auto* tools.  In the course of
reading it, I came to the conclusion that they seemed to be more work than
they were worth, so I abandoned the prospect.  I am interested in
seeing Jeremy's "menuconfig" to see if that is a more palatable solution.

Matthew Fredrickson