On Wed, 2015-12-16 at 13:09 +0100, katja wrote:
Forgot to mention most important thing. Before investing much time in a lib's build system, try to locate the upstream source and discuss your ideas with the author or maintainer. This raises the question where upstream sources currently are, that is for another thread.
This assumes that I do have some idea about how things should be done and probably also that my idea would suit everybody.
In turns out I have to work on things first before getting an idea, especially when it comes to build systems. As I see it, I'm trying out stuff and I put it on github so that the process is comprehensible. This does not necessarily implicate any opinion of mine the upstream author should adapt their build system to mine. My goals might be totally different from theirs.
My goal is to make some externals available through deken. I achieve this by building those externals myself. It turned out that autotools gave me head-aches, especially when cross-compiling and I need less time to write a pd-lib-builder Makefile than to figure out how to build with autotools/mingw-w64. I figured out that if I plan to maintain those builds also in the future, the process needs to be streamlined and I need to unify as much as possible the way I build for different platforms but also how I build different externals. At this point, I came to the conclusion the most sustainable way for _me_ is to turn what I maintain to pd-lib-builder.
I care about having some externals in deken. The upstream author might care, too, or doesn't. I don't care so much whether they care. If externals are not available, I try to make them available. If the upstream author decides to put their externals to deken themselves, I'm happy to give them back the maintenance of the deken builds.
For me, the switch from Pd-extended to deken, from svn to git is more than a technical shift. It's a shift from monoculture to a decentralized culture, from asking to doing, from hesitating to trying, from discussing to implementing, from stepping on each others toes to dancing together at the same party. Yes, it is less organized and harder to get an overview of, but the advantages of the decentralized culture outbalance the disadvantages by at least an order of magnitude.
And no, I think I won't discuss my ideas with upstream.. :-)
Roman