Re: [Monotone-devel] could we get away with requiring perl during the build, for botan's sake?

[Markus Schiltknecht]

Hi,

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> I noticed yesterday while updating AUTHORS that our copy of Botan is
> way out of date.  The newer version has some nice things in it - for
> example, tuned assembly versions of SHA1 - but the catch is, you
> configure the library for the target processor etc. with a Perl
> script.

Ehm.. configure.pl has been in botan since its very beginning. We are 
not including it in monotone, instead we use pre-configured sources. 
Have a look at botan/README.botan-monotone in n.v.m, about how botan is 
included in monotone.

I've already gone through the steps necessary and upgraded monotone to 
botan 1.7.2, at least in n.v.m.botan. I'm just running 'make check', but 
AFAICS it's ready for propagation to n.v.m. Any objections?

It's important to note that we are potentially loosing CPU specific 
optimizations. Because due to not running configure.pl, we build a 
generic variant (with a static build.h). AFAICT botan doesn't provide 
lots of optimized assembler code, yet. So that might not be much of an 
issue, yet.

However, once again it occurs to me, that it's silly stating that we 
don't have any external dependencies and instead drag in complete source 
codes of other projects. Using dynamic libraries certainly has its own 
set of problems, but IMO it's the more standard way to go.

Another issue: the branch "au.asn.ucc.matt.botan.monotone-2" should 
better be available on monotone.ca, as long as we propagate botan to 
there before merging it manually into n.v.m.botan.  I don't have write 
access on ucc.asn.au, so I couldn't push my changes to that branch.

Regards

Markus