[Box Backup-dev] Reviewing code -- help!

[Martin Ebourne]

On Sun, 2005-12-11 at 01:33 +0000, Chris Wilson wrote:
> Hi Ben,
> > Not terribly bothered if it's necessary, although maybe the 
> > infrastructure/makedistribution.pl script could do the copying when it's all 
> > wrapped up for release?
> 
> Same problem - how do we find the builder's automake directory? And I like 
> the idea of these files being known quantities and versioned, rather than 
> subject to the vagaries of the builder's machine. But I can try if you 
> still want me to. Or we can try to rewrite these scripts ourselves to 
> avoid the license issue.

Those files are not normally needed for configure. They are needed in
this case because of the AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM macro being used to detect
windows. Ideally we wouldn't need to do a platform test because
everything could be broken down into feature tests. Then these files
would not be necessary.

However, it doesn't really matter. We have to check them in (along with
the other generated configure files). I don't like doing this, but
Charles Lecklider has pointed out that people won't be able to build the
windows version from svn if we don't - not unless they get all the
autoconf tools installed, which we don't want. At some point I'm
therefore planning to check in configure et al.

As to the licence of the files, as I explained before there is no clash
in licensing here, and the GPL on these files cannot apply to the rest
of box. Rewriting these scripts is nonsensical. Lots of BSD and other
non GPL projects use autoconf, there really are no issues.

I don't want to check the configure etc files in until a few people have
tried it out and generated them for themselves. I particularly want to
make sure Ben can build from first principles on his system before I
check this in!

Cheers,

Martin.