[omniORB] omniORB build enviroment

[Duncan Grisby]

On Thursday 5 July, Kevin Bailey wrote:

[...]
> >  3. A Python script which builds everything

[...]
> Something like this may hurt people who prefer their own tools,
> such as a parallel make. Everyone has make, right ?

Well, most people don't have GNU make by default, and the current
makefiles require that. Some platforms (OpenVMS, for example) don't
have make at all, and require something altogether different.

> Also, I can't imagine writing an entire build system would be
> easier than learning autoconf. ;)

I'm sure learning autoconf would be easier than writing something new,
but it should be possible to do better than autoconf. I'm not sure
that anyone completely understands autoconf.

> The main thing I'd like to see out of the omniORB  build system
> is the ability to compile/create the object and other files in a
> different location than the source. Currently omniORB compiles
> in place. This makes compiling for 2 platforms at the same time
> hard. We are having to copy the entire tree to 2 other places
> (via links) in order to accomplish this.

The build system we use internally actually supports this already.
That's why "make export" puts things in lib/$ARCH and bin/$ARCH in the
tree, rather than just lib and bin. Internally, we have a single NFS
mounted tree which contains build trees and export trees for all our
platforms.

Almost everything that's needed for that is included in the external
distribution, but it's slightly clobbered for no particularly good
reason. At the very least, I'll try to make it an option for the
omniORB 4 release.

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby  \  Research Engineer  --
  -- AT&T Laboratories Cambridge          --
   -- http://www.uk.research.att.com/~dpg1 --