[bug #52518] [GWorkspace] Unnecessarily complex build system

[Yavor Doganov]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52518>

                 Summary: [GWorkspace] Unnecessarily complex build system
                 Project: GNUstep
            Submitted by: yavor
            Submitted on: Sun 26 Nov 2017 09:11:13 PM EET
                Category: Application
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Change Request
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any

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Details:

GWorkspace's build system is incredibly convoluted: there are 56 (!) nested
configure scripts, 14 config headers and 59 makefiles that are generated,
while only a small number of them have @something@ to be AC_SUBST'ed.  I tried
to find out whether there is specific reason for this approach, but couldn't
figure out why it was done this way.  Perhaps it remained so from Enrico's
days and nobody had the chance to clean it up.

The only legitimate reason for using AC_CONFIG_SUBDIRS is when software in
sub-directories is distributed as stand-alone packages (e.g., separate
self-contained tarballs for the frameworks, extractors, viewers, ddbd and the
rest of the tools)  That is not the case and I doubt it ever will be.

The attached patch, while rather intrusive, reduces the time for running
"./configure --enable-gwmetadata" more than 10 times and reduces the size of
the tarball with approx 2.5 MB.  It also fixes quotation of Autoconf macros in
some places, replaces the obsolete AC_TRY_RUN macro with AC_RUN_IFELSE and
fixes the build with LDFLAGS=-Wl,--as-needed.

Please let me know if something doesn't work as expected or if you have some
other remarks.  Thanks.



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File Attachments:


-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun 26 Nov 2017 09:11:13 PM EET  Name:
0001-Simplify-build-system.patch.xz  Size: 49KiB   By: yavor

<http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/download.php?file_id=42493>

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