[Pkg-ace-devel] Re: Simplified GUI support in ACE/TAO

[Marek Brudka]

Hi Johnny,
Johnny Willemsen wrote:

>  A question, when we add qt=1, fl=1, tk=1 and xt=1 to the
>  default.features file we use in the release process when generating
>  the gnu makefiles, then this is safe to do? When someone then want
>  to build he/she has to set qt,fl,tk,xt on the commandline or in
>  their platform_macros.GNU

AFAIK it is safe to add these features to default.features in ACE
release, because make
still needs all these options to be passed when building ACE.

The result of such modification is that, when someone tries to
regenerate Makefiles using
MPC, then all GUI related projects will be created as if required GUI
toolkits were available.
For gnuace it is safe, because make will omit these projects if
qt,fl,tk,xt are not set. However
for MSVC this may lead to problems, as MSVC does not need any
additional options,
hence it will try to compile and link all those GUI stuff.

I think we have a serious incopatibilities between Makefiles and MPC,
when comparing
the old include/makeinclude build system with new MPC based one. I
suppose also that
for a  while we can deal with current mix, but IMHO a long term
solution is to either make
ACE MPC projects independent on include/makeinclude or to replace (or
evaluate) MPC by
something else. Another option are configuration scripts
(autoconf/automake and
something else for win32) which use MPC to generate build files. The
last solution implies
rather that all makefiles, vcproj and similiar should not be included
in ACE release.

I would argue to generate makefiles in ACE release for
qt=1,xt=1,fl=1,tk=1 (eg. using
mwc.pl -features qt=1,xt=1,fl=1,tk=1), but leave these features
disabled in default.features.
This way one can easily compile GUI stuff in release version, but when
regenerating then
using MPC one has to explicitly state that required packages are
available.

Marek