[Buildroot] [PATCH v4 03/17] package/pkg-rebar: new infrastructure

[Johan Oudinet]

Thomas, Yann, All,

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 9:24 AM, Thomas Petazzoni
<thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Jan 2015 22:59:56 +0100, Yann E. MORIN wrote:
>
>> In the end, I did not implement that because it is too much overkill.
>> Also, I kept _CONFIGURE because it is what people do expect: the package
>> needs to be configured before being built. But I am not completely
>> opposed to changing the variable name. _USE_AUTOTOOLS or _USE_AUTOCONF
>> is equally fit, I guess (although I'd still prefer _AUTOTOOLS, because
>> it matches the fact that we call back to the autotools infrastructure
>> underneath.
>
> Unfortunately, I disagree on this. "Configure" is a very vague term,
> which does not necessarily mean "run an autoconf generated ./configure
> script". We do have certain generic-package packages that do provide an
> implementation for the <pkg>_CONFIGURE_CMDS that aren't calling an
> autoconf generated ./configure script.
>
> Moreover, a non-autoconf using rebar package may want to implement its
> <pkg>_CONFIGURE_CMDS to do some stuff. But it would have to keep
> <pkg>_CONFIGURE set to NO. This is really confusing.
>
> Please, use <pkg>_USE_AUTOTOOLS, <pkg>_AUTOTOOLS or <pkg>_USE_AUTOCONF.
> I tend to prefer the latter, because this is really what the user is
> seeing: the package is using autoconf. You say you prefer _AUTOTOOLS
> because it matches the fact that we're using the autotools
> infrastructure underneath, but that's an implementation detail. It's
> much better to expose things that make sense for the package developer
> that things that relate to implementation details, IMO.

I tend to agree with Thomas on this point and not only because I've
already modified all erlang packages to the USE_AUTOCONF syntax ;-)
Actually, even though pkg-rebar uses the autotools infrastructure, it
does redefine the BUILD_CMDS. So automake is never called. Using the
term AUTOTOOLS might be confusing to the package developer as he would
expect its Makefile.am to be read.
I'm going to push a new version soon, so you can modify it if you want.
-- 
Johan