Libtool and Autotools additions

[aldemira]

Hi Jude,
I've boldly changed the source code tree and added autotool files for a standard configure - make - make install style installation, which most people are accustomed with. I've also added standard debian dir so that we can use this code in devuan & debian with not much effort. I'd like to do the same operation to vdev (and other related modules).
I'm also planning to create an rpm spec so we can infect other distors too ;)

Regards

[jcnelson]

Hi @aldemira,

Thank you so much for your pull request! I've been thinking about this in the back of my mind for a couple of days. I'm more than happy to merge scripts to make packaging easier--this is definitely something I could use help on.

However, I'm really hesitant to add support for autotools. This is a small low-level package that isn't meant to support more than a handful of modern UNIX-like operating systems (currently only Linux), and I think autotools is overkill in this particular case. The patch is almost two orders of magnitude bigger than the existing codebase--that's a lot of code to maintain, especially considering that autotools' main use-case (providing a portable build environment) doesn't really apply here.

If the reason for adding autotools is to provide a familiar ./configure; make; make install workflow, maybe there's a way to write a tiny configure script that just sets a few parameters in the Makefile (like BINDIR, INCLUDEDIR, etc.) but leaves out the rest of autotools. What do you think?

Thanks,
Jude

[aldemira]

Hi Jude,
I understand that, this is quite a drastic change and an overkill for this package. Please deny the request.
However autotools make it very easy to create the configure script, I'd never dream of writing one from scratch :) Maintenance would be a nightmare (especially if someone adds support for other OS)
So I have a few questions, will you be ok if I send a new pull request for an rpm spec file and the debian/ directory for package generation using the original file tree?
And for vdev, shall I work on deb and rpm generation + autotools?

Regards,

Aldemir