source files format request

[Josh Howard]

synaptical <synaptical at linuxquestions.net> writes:

> i've never understood the concept of wanting to make something more
> difficult for end users rather than easier, but then again i'm a
> technical writer not a programmer. :p but i guess you have your
> reasons, which i hope are more because of something like changing the
> naming convention would screw up some procedure/s on the development
> end (lots of scripts would have to be changed, etc.), rather than
> "just because." anyway, i'll try one of the other methods you
> mentioned or maybe try to make a script myself. i'd never heard of
> garxfce before, that looks promising.

Source orders could possibly change at some point and CVS doesn't
make the renaming of files particularly easy. The naming convention
shouldn't be tied to build order as they, in theory, aren't really
that related. While xffm may have a requirement of libxfce4, it
doesn't need to be built 5th. It can be built at any point after
libxfce4 is built. (Where by my saying libxfce4, I'm being generic
and meaning whatever required libs.)
I think like many people wanting to build a XFCE from source, I read
the simple instructions that are on the web page and wrote a script
that's probably all of 6 lines to do the builds for me. Generally
speaking, if you're not following CVS, then you're compiling release
code that only needs once every 4 or 5 months or simply installing
binaries. If you're a developer, following CVS and having your own
build process is not going to be out of the question.
I wouldn't disagree with the idea of the xfce4 module having a top
level makefile that you could run a 'make world' in that would create
things in the proper order. It would be pretty simple and wouldn't
need to be modified very often. It's easy enough to read in some
environment variables for ./configure for the directories, etc.
However, as someone else pointed out, someone put a fair amount of
effort into one building script that looked pretty good, or you could
do as I did and write a pretty simple little for loop for the making.

-- 
Josh Howard <jrh at zeppelin.net>