[Mingw-cross-env-list] Proposal for new guidelines

[Volker Grabsch]

As I promised, I thought about the issue of system independent
code generators and "autogen patches". As a result, I propose a
few new guidelines:

    1)  We should minimize the size of patches and build rules.
        It is important for mingw-cross-env to stay small in
        order to remain maintainable.

    2)  We should minimize the number of requirements of
        mingw-cross-env, but 1) has precedence.

    3)  We should minimize the number of native builds performed
        by mingw-cross-env. Otherwise we would duplicate the work
        of the distros. This is direct consequence of 1).

    4)  We should build all tools that must appear in a particular
        version. This is usually the case for code generators
        that are part of the cross-compiled libraries. And it
        is the case for Binutils and GCC.

    5)  We should build pkg-config. This appears to be an
        exception from the previous guidelines.

-> What do you think about these guidelines?

Alternatively to 5), we could also require a native pkg-config
and provide a wrapper "i686-pc-mingw32-pkg-config" which sets
PKG_CONFIG_PATH accordingly. On the other hand, pkg-config builds
very quickly, so it wouldn't really make a difference.

-> What do you think about that?

Consequences of the new guidelines are:

    A)  removal of all *-autogen patches

    B)  three new requirements: autoconf >= 2.50, flex and bison

            (I really hope we won't need anything more,
             especially no automake, libtool, etc.)

    C)  modification of libodbc++-win32.patch to
        fix "configure.ac" instead of "configure"

-> Are there other consequences that I missed?


Greets,

    Volker

-- 
Volker Grabsch
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