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From: Matt Massie <matt@cloudera.com>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:16:05 -0700
Message-ID: <35538fbe0910160116p19592d5ah85a04608e52ee8aa@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Request for feedback regarding distribution of Avro C code
To: Avro Developers <avro-dev@hadoop.apache.org>
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My experience has been that bolting autotool projects to ant projects causes
*tons* of grieve for developers and consumers alike.  Originally, I packaged
the C code the way I've seen it done for other Hadoop projects even though I
don't agree with the approach.  Now, I'd like to do things differently if
the team agrees.

I propose the following:

(1) Leave the "cdoc" and "package-c" targets in build.xml but remove all
other C targets (e.g. configure-c, compile-c).  This will allow us to
continue generating documentation and packaging the C code from ant.
(2) Change the "package-c" target to run autotool's 'make distcheck' to
create a distributable tarball (called avro-c-x.x.x.tar.gz).  People
familiar with compiling native code will know to extract the tarball and
then run "./configure;make".  Creating this tarball with autotools will
ensure that all the necessary files exist (with the correct permissions),
that 'make install uninstall' works without leaving files behind, remove any
dependency on autotools, etc.
(3) Instead of having a "Linux-i386-32" directory inside the top-level 'c'
directory, users will find a ready-to-use avro-c-x.x.x.tar.gz C package and
a README file

People who want to work on the C source in svn/git will very likely be
familiar with how to manage autotools and this setup wouldn't prevent them
from happily hacking away.  Developers and users both would be happy and we
wouldn't have to abuse ant and autotools in the process.

-Matt

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