Re: cons for modular packages

[Axel Hecht]

Steven Knight wrote:

> On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Axel Hecht wrote:

> <..>
>
>
> > 2) For building software, that depends on several modules, special
> > targets would be great. The mozilla build system has something like
> > this, called modules. The file based approach wouldn't really cut it
> > here. A big issue is, that people wouldn't want the complete gnome
> > repository, or mozilla sources, or whatever on their disk, just to find
> > out how to build the header of one rather good defined module.
> > Additionally, the module name is not always a file or directory name
> > (SeaMonkey in case for mozilla, that's not in a single filename)
> > I think of something like this: you wanna build koffice, so you pull the
> > main Construct, and build the 'module' (I stick to this term, I know
> > it's used differently in cons) "KOffice". So Construct would pull the
> > module list, check the dependencies, pull kdelibs and kdecore and
> > whatelse, and builds all those in one go. Finally you can go to bed
> > while doing this stuff, you don't have to start building a package every
> > 20mins. ;-)
>
>
> There's a proposal on the table for an Alias command that would allow
> for expansion of special (non-file) target names to a list of targets.
>
> For mozilla's purposes, would it be sufficient to support Aliases
> (special targets) like this only on the command line?  Or is it necessary
> to establish large-scale dependencies between special-target subsystems
> by specifying them within the config (Conscript) files?

Hi Steven,
having thought on this a bit further, a rather neat way to do this would be

Construct:

# Import/Export stuff would be here

# and then for each component:

Depends $env LayoutSDK,'%src/layout/Conscript';
Depends $env Layout,'%src/layout/Conscript';

and then in layout/Conscript

Alias LayoutSDK,'header1.h','header1.h';
Alias Layout,'layout'; # how to specify liblayout.so cross platform?

Just an idea, map the syntax freely, these are about my first self 
written Conscripts :-)

Axel