[Skencil-devel] Skencil build issues in modern environment

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2007-03-05 at 11:02 +0200, Bernhard Reiter wrote:
> On Thursday 03 May 2007 10:42, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > There has been a patch fixing a 64bit problem two days ago:
> > > http://wald.intevation.org/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/skencil/branches/sk
> > >encil-0.6/Pax/fontobject.c?root=skencil&rev=694&r1=686&r2=694
> >
> > Yes, that's in my package (it's SVN rev 695).
> 
> Very good, I was only making this sure.
> 
> > > > Hope this is interesting to all. If anyone wants to help on the Tcl/Tk
> > > > 8.5 / font issue, that would be greatly welcomed :)
> > >
> > > Yes, this is all very interesting!
> > > We need to incoporate your changes in the Skencil codebase
> > > (and help with this is appreciated).
> >
> > I'm not qualified for that, I'm not a coder at all :) I just try to make
> > the stuff build.
> 
> Most of the changes you have made are for the build code
> which is part of the code base. We just have to separate the generel
> improvements from the Mandriva specific ones.

I feel that the changes I do are hacks, not genuine solutions. From what
I've seen, the build system Skencil uses is rather old, and I suspect if
you look at what is available in python 2.5 or what is used by other
modern python apps, it would include much more robust fixes for the same
issues.

> > I forgot to mention some other things in my mail...we have the
> following
> > two workarounds in the spec, too, they pre-date my changes:
> 
> As I said, we could add the mandriva specs to the Skencil repository,
> but I know that you already maintain them in your SCM, so it might
> not be necessary. So we only need to extract which of your changes
> are interesting for all Skencil users/builders.

I feel at least the first workaround indicates a problem with Skencil:
the Skencil build process is doing something wrong to actually write the
buildroot directories into the generated files. Generally speaking, with
a good build system, this kind of workaround in a spec file is not
necessary. I'm sorry I'm not a hacker and so can't tell you what the
build process is doing wrong :(
-- 
adamw