Re: [Xen-devel] inclusion of figlet source - Keir Fraser - com.xensource.lists.xen-devel

4 messages in com.xensource.lists.xen-develRe: [Xen-devel] inclusion of figlet s...

From	Sent On	Attachments
Adam Heath	28 Dec 2004 21:27
Keir Fraser	29 Dec 2004 00:57
Adam Heath	29 Dec 2004 14:17
Jacob Gorm Hansen	02 Jan 2005 21:39

Subject:	Re: [Xen-devel] inclusion of figlet source
From:	Keir Fraser (Keir...@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date:	12/29/2004 12:57:13 AM
List:	com.xensource.lists.xen-devel

Why is figlet source included in xen? Wouldn't it make more sense to alter xen/Makefile, to have compile.h built from a .in, and the figlet view of the version info, and have the upstream developers regen the figlet part when the version changes?

Perhaps it should be under xen/tools/figlet rather than xen/figlet, but it is tiny and it is useful to have the banner auto-gen'ed from the version number in the Makefile. There's no obvious advantage to removing it -- it hardly bloats the repository and it takes negligible time to build.

Using autoconf/automake would make sense for a highly portable application that must compile on many platforms with many different environments and compilers. For Xen I think it'll just complicate things. We only support one arch at the moment -- as others are incorporated they will extend compile.h manually for their own compilation environment if it isn't GCC. The main thing that autoconf does of course is shield you from environment differences (e.g. sysv vs. bsd) -- but Xen never includes system headers so this is also a non-issue.

I'm willing to modify the build system to do this. I'm also fixing several other poor implementation of things.

We recommend as far as possible that you don't work on improvements in a vacuum. The earlier you let us know what you're doing, the earlier you get feedback on what we do and don't want.

-- Keir