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Date: Thu, 11 May 2000 13:39:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: Greg Stein <gstein@lyra.org>
To: new-httpd@apache.org
Subject: Re: mod_example in 2.0
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0005111319040.5898-100000@koj.rkbloom.net>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.10.10005111332410.24926-100000@nebula.lyra.org>
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On Thu, 11 May 2000 rbb@covalent.net wrote:
> On Thu, 11 May 2000, Greg Stein wrote:
>...
> > Yes, but Tony wasn't talking about that. He was discussing a "cosmetic
> > unpleasantness."
> > 
> > Read the mail :-)
> 
> I did.  The first line is:
> 
> > > > I'm fiddling with the build stuff to get mod_exaple functioning in 2.0
> 
> I'm sorry, did I mis-read that?

Not at all, but the actual mail had nothing to do with fixing stuff in
mod_example (which, as you pointed out, you had already done). It was
about ordering in the config stuff.

Look, so I called you on a useless mail :-) There was a smiley. in that
note. What's the biggy? :-)


Now... onto the meat of the matter...

> > Tony: I'm not sure that shifting the .m4 stuff *out* of the directory is
> > appropriate. Is there any way we can adjust that find? Can we make the
> > find a bit more explicit? e.g. grab the modules/extra first, then the mpm
> > modules, then the rest?
> > 
> > Dunno how to do that, tho... hard problem :-(
> > 
> > If we could name the config files like 00config.m4, 01config.m4, etc, and
> > then run them thru 'sort' on the last part of the path, then we could
> > force the right order. Dunno how portable 'sort' is, though. Here is a
> > quick hack:
> > 
> > find . -name config.m4 | awk -F / -- '{print $(NF), $0 | "sort" }'
> >        | awk -- '{print $2}'
> > 
> > Dunno if there is a way to combine those two 'awk' invocations.
> 
> As for the rest of this, aren't we jumping the gun on this?  There has
> been a lot of talk about fixing the autoconf stuff, which would vastly
> simplify this problem, and most likely solve it for us.

I'm not sure that any "fixes" are in the area of "how do we glom all the
independent config stuff together?" but more along the lines of cleaning
up how certain things are done.

> The fact is, the Apache Autoconf is doing too much stuff.  It is checking
> for things it doesn't need, which makes the config hard to deal with.  If
> the platform specific stuff is moved to APR and removed from Apache, the
> MPM and standard module selection becomes pretty much all that is left in
> Apache, and the problem of which file to make the call from goes away,
> because this can all be moved to a single file.

Sure, but modules will still need to supply their own config. The problem
in question is how to gather up all of those independent config files and
deal with them. For example, when Acme, Inc places mod_acme into
src/modules/acme/, they will have a config.m4 that (say) tests for
libacme's location in the filesystem. The "find" allows that config to be
gathered up into Apache's ./configure script.

My find/awk stuff allows us to order them as we grab them from here and
there. (and ordering was the particular problem)

I don't think we can axe the 'find', so the question is how to deal with
the ordering issue so that the --help seems reasonable. (and, I surmise,
that the configuration process has a reasonable sequence of progress
output)

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/