[ REQ 5660]: Distribution and Makefiles

[Robert_Patrick at methi.ndim.edrc.cmu.edu]

Hi,

I wanted to tell you that your package looks really cool; however, I have some 
complaints about your "source distribution".  First of all, I'm not your 
average "joe user" who complains whenever something doesn't build right out of 
the box.  Given the range of platforms, configurations, etc., it is really 
hard to distribute software that build right in all circumstances.  Believe 
me, I have plenty of experience making things work...

Here are some problems I've run into that you might (or might not) want to 
think about:

1.) Your geomview-1.5.0-src.tar.gz has "hard links" in the tar file.  Although 
this is fine for people installing on a local disk, it fucks up severely when 
installing it on a distributed filesystem, such as AFS.  I would suggest that 
you consider replacing the hard links with symbolic links.

2.) On a related note, your Makefiles also try to create hard links (which is 
a really pain in the ass to change since there is no global definition to 
change...

3.) The ordering of your (included) Makefiles seems to be a little careless, 
although it could be related to some other problem that I just haven't found 
yet.  When using gmake on the alpha, it bitches about including libraries (and 
other things) multiple times in a single target.  Switching to regular make 
seems to solve that problem (regular make is probably too stupid to figure it 
out), although I haven't finished hacking all your Makefiles so I don't know 
if that fixes everything.

Hopefully, I will eventually get all these issues resolved so that I can get 
Geomview built and installed.  In case you care, I am trying to install your 
package for all our "supported platforms" in AFS, which includes OSF/1 2.0 & 
3.2, SunOS 4.1.3, Solaris 2.4, Irix 5.3, HP/UX 9.0.5, AIX 3.2.5, and Ultrix 
4.4.  These distributions ( assuming I get it to compile :-) ) will get 
installed on everyone's local machine using some CMU magic that updates 
symlinks in /usr/local/{bin,lib,include...} every night so that everyone in 
the CS department can use it without having to copy the binaries to local disk.

If you're interested, I would be willing to send you any changes that I make 
that I feel improves the portability of the package.

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated,
Robert

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| Robert Patrick (rp2y+@edrc.cmu.edu) Engineering Design Research Center |
| n-dim Group                                 Carnegie Mellon University |
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