[MPlayer-dev-eng] deterministic builds

[Joey Parrish]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2003 at 06:52:33PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> These "restrictions" are not really worth talking about, if its only
> the question of several names for the same thing. Well, those stuff 
> could/should be handled by machines. (ie. --sysconfdir vs. --confdir)

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.

The beauty of writing automation software is not in homogeneity, it's
in the fact that you can teach a machine to cope with a lack of it.

So why did you decide to create this distro with automated package
creation if you aren't willing to do SIMPLE work to automate?

> If you want to build greater distributions w/o having to do evrything
> by hand, its really necessary, that you can rely the computer does exactly
> what you want. I get a headache when build systems tend to use dozens
> of libs found on my system without asking me. This is okay, if you just
> install one package after another, but you get into big trouble when 
> you're using an package manager which doesn get informed about those
> dependencies.

If your manager doesn't get informed... and you're the one writing the
manager... *blink*

> But can I use it without knowing too much internals of the build system ?

Have you tried?

> 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.

Then comes the task of convincing the rest of the software world that
your way is correct and that they should all abandon proven, tested
methods.

_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.

--Joey

-- 
"Living in the complex world of the future is somewhat
like having bees live in your head.  But, there they are."