Re: Fox toolkit future?

On 6/24/23 14:14, Ulrich Teichert wrote:
>> 3. How about moving away from GNU autotools? Moving to CMake or Meson (or
>> something else?) may relieve you of having to maintain Visual Studio
>> solution files. There are already unofficial versions of the toolkit using
>> different build systems.
> In my opinon, using GNU autotools is the most portable way. cmake is such a
> pain to use on systems which are not exactly mainstream, not to speak of
> systems to where it's not ported yet or using a compiler which it knows
> nothing about.
>
There are a great many platforms in the "Installation" link on the Web 
site where FOX builds and runs that CMake will never be ported to.

HP/UX  Windows 95/98/ME/XP   Most likely OpenWatcom and whatever 
platforms it currently supports. SUN Solaris, Tru64, Digital Unix, etc.

Moving to a a more modern build system would require a deliberate choice 
to drop heritage platforms and possibly Herculean documentation update 
effort.

One thing that might be nice is for the code base to include all of the 
scripts to make Debian and RPM packages, even Arch packages. I mean 
someone is obviously doing it for Debian

https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libfox-1.6-0

and RPM

http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=fox

and Arch

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/fox/

and an AUR

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fox-devel

Since I don't see the code to build these (haven't looked lately) in the 
code base, switching the build would basically jack everything downstream.


Of course, what is being assumed in this entire thread is this:

FOX is a community development effort

The reality, it seems to me, is that FOX is a Jeroen effort. Jeroen is 
kind enough to share it under OpenSource license and generates a lot of 
documentation, but, right now, it is one person's dream . . . that 
accepts patches from the outside world.

I'm okay with that. We get full source to do with what we wish. The 
library focuses on stability rather than chasing the latest trends.

CMake (even though I voted for it) would be one of the latest trends. 
Now that I looked I see that it would trash an awful lot of downstream 
packaging efforts. Speaking as someone who does packaging, that sucks! 
RPM is a house of cards to begin with. Debian is just a special zip file 
so not so bad.


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