[apparmor] [PATCH] towards a common build infrastructure

[Steve Beattie]

Hi Kees,

Thanks for starting this conversation; I'd been thinking about this as
well for 2.8+1.

On Sun, May 06, 2012 at 06:50:27PM -0700, Kees Cook wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2012 at 12:09:08AM +0000, Seth Arnold wrote:
> > Use $MAKE instead, that way the jobserver can keep informed about how many jobs sub-makes are using.
> > 
> > I do like that ./configure --prefix makes selecting between /usr and /usr/local easy but I have trouble seeing what else it gives us.
> 
> Sanity for shared library creation (libtool, pkg-config, etc), automatic
> handling of finding functions (e.g. I'm building on Debian kfreebsd...),
> and finding dep version (e.g. swig, perl, python, ruby, apache). Trying to
> do all this by hand is a waste of time -- all of the needed logic already
> exists in autoconf/automake.

While that's mostly true, while trying to enable the libapparmor
python library, I found the intersection of autotools + swig +
dh_python2 inscrutable in that I could not figure out what magic
was required to build for more than one python version. I *think*
part of the issue there was that while it's easy to test for the
existence of swig binaries, autotools macro support for swig is not
well integrated into the default set of macros.

Historical issues have been that I've tended to use toplevel make
targets to deal with release management in consistent way. Needing
to run the autotools stuff before that can be done feels suboptimal.
These could potentially be shove to shell scripts, but again, less
than ideal.

But that said, I think we should move toward a standardized tooling
infrastructure. Whether that's autotools or cmake, I'd like to hear
opinions.

> > And now tell me how automake can make things simpler than this ;-)
> 
> I know it'll be hard to convince you, but without being too flippant, the
> automake version of your example is a single line, just "SUBDIRS = ...". :)

For people that are not familiar with autotools, I highly recommend the
tutorial at:

  http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~adl/autotools.html

It explained a lot of autotools concepts and usage in ways that I
had not seen clearly explained before.

-- 
Steve Beattie
<sbeattie at ubuntu.com>
http://NxNW.org/~steve/
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