[MeeGo-dev] Remote developing platform, remote building, personal/team repositories...

[RISKÓ Gergely]

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:47:12 +0200, "Ville M. Vainio" <vivainio at gmail.com> writes:

> Note that going forward, automake is not something an average MeeGo
> developer will be subjected to, for better or worse.

I hear this everywhere around me, and I want to express my concerns.
Automake/autoconf is not some legacy that we have to cope with for 2
more years, and then we can forgot it (like the 256Mb rootfs), no it is
not.

It is a very good project management tool for projects, where simple
Makefiles/qmake are not enough (for whatever reason: support many
different configurations with ifdefs; having nice make targets, like
uninstall, install, dist, distcheck; VPATH builds).  I think it is a
very, very bad intention to bring the (future) MeeGo developers to the
same silliness level as the iPhone or Android developers[1].  Meego
intends to be a free software project with good free software practices,
automake/autoconf is included in this phrase, period.

New projects are being implemented with automake even as we discuss, do
not think that the problems that autoconf/automake solve are from the
past, they are not.  We will have a lot of different configurations
inside Meego (I guess that TV boxes will not have an accelerometer), and
we want to contribute back to free software, which means that if someone
develops a free application for MeeGo, they should be able to ship it in
a form (if they want), that it is compilable with any GNU environment.

Otherwise we are just creating another closed platform, iPhone
applications are closed (since nobody really cares about Objective-C
outside Apple), Android applications are closed (because running
Java(TM) on a GNU system is still slow and painful), MeeGo applications
will be closed (because no one implements the same compilation
environment).

QT/Automake integration:
http://www.mail-archive.com/automake-patches@gnu.org/msg01660.html
http://qt.gitorious.org/~ErrGe/qt/moc-dependency-generation

ContextKit, where Qt is used with autotools (we switched from qmake,
because we had issues with it):
http://maemo.gitorious.org/maemo-af/contextkit

Gergely

Footnotes:
[1]  Of course we have to support those kind of developers, but we
should not forget about the seasoned free software guys in the process.