[MPlayer-dev-eng] deterministic builds

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Joey Parrish <joey at nicewarrior.org> [2003-12-21 13:54:24 -0600]:

<snip>
> Yes.  Isn't that the point of your proposed distro?  To have machines do
> all the dirty work, so that you can eliminate human intervention?  It's
> far more human intervention, not to mention pointless work, to write
> letters to every single project that chooses against automake.  Just
> write a simple stub and be done with it.
Yes, of course its no problem doing this for one or two packages, but
if evryone's doing it completely different, this consumes very much time.
This gets even worse, if the arguments someday change. (As we already 
mentioned, the mplayer's configure syntax isnt consistent over several
versions!)

<snip>
> So why did you decide to create this distro with automated package
> creation if you aren't willing to do SIMPLE work to automate?
Well, perhaps I was hoping for some little help of the package developers ...
Distro maintainance could be almost obsolete if the developers would 
use the right design for build systems ...

<snip>
> > If we had an good modeling of software structure (not dozens of rulesets),
> > we write it down only once and let the machines do evrything.
> 
> Great.  Create such a system and then convince this list that it's worth
> the effort of abandoning one that already WORKS, and you're bound to
> have more success than you are now.

Hah, this is the same evryone's saying ... and so nothing happens because 
evryone likes hacking and hacking on build rules again and again much more than 
instead sitting together with others and create something which reduces 
99% of this work to writing an small project descriptor file. 

<snip>
> _OR_ write a simple stub and be done with it.  Seriously, it'll take 5
> minutes, even if you don't know much bash.  Just copy and paste from
> confdir to sysconfdir.
Thats not the point. (I've already said - this is just syntactic sugar ...)

The main problem is that the build process is not consistent over different version.
It doesnt seem to be possible to find out which optional modules/features are 
provided and which libs are needed for them w/o looking over the whole stuff
manually. I'd do this one time, also a second time, but not on each release!

It could be so easy, if we would use a build system which can tell you those 
things in easy machine readable form.


cu
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