Makefile.am for innd

[Russ Allbery]

Jay G Scott <gl at arlut.utexas.edu> writes:

> not sure i want to REALLY do this, but if the smoke clears
> sufficiently i might be able to contribute a more modern
> configure.ac
> Makefile.am
> to the cause of innd.  one thing i know has to be addressed is
> installing and setting ownership, something automake doesn't
> support directly.

The configure.ac in CURRENT is very, very modern.  :)  Please do check the
CURRENT snapshots from ftp://ftp.isc.org/isc/inn/snapshots before
starting.  I'll happily accept contributions (well, as soon as our CVS
repository is back on-line so that I can actually commit something), but
you don't want to start with 2.4.

As for Automake, I personally am not particularly fond of it and am not
sure that it can do what INN wants to do.  In particular, I'd like for
running configure to be reasonably fast and for libtool to be optional,
and both of those are going to be hard to do with Automake.  I don't mind
the general idea of Automake, but I think the makefiles that it produces
are unreadable and therefore difficult to maintain.

Handling the storage and history directories will also be a challenge.

That being said, using Automake would potentially address some other
issues that INN currently has (building where builddir != srcdir, for
instance), so I'm not sure that I'd veto it in advance.  Just be aware
that it's not at all clear to me that using Automake would actually be an
improvement over the current situation.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please send questions to the list rather than mailing me directly.
     <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.