Improving the management and accessibility of the handling of JDK variants

[Dave Pointon]

Hi Magnus et al ,

On Thu, 2013-11-21 at 16:30 +0000, Dave Pointon wrote:
<snip>
> In the process of attempting to describe the changes I'm playing with,
> I've realized that I've made a coupla wrong assumptions and completely
> inflexible and thus inappropriate, design decisions. I'll post further
> once I believe I have a more generally applicable/useful model to
> impart ...
> 
> Rgds,

... further to the above, I have a more general question which is: what,
if anything, is the general view on dynamically generated and included
autoconf m4 scripts - by way of explanation ... I have, thus far, been
toying with adding a new general variant handling/management
script (jdk-variants.m4) which sinclude's a variant specific handling/
management script (jdk-variants-list.m4) as generated by an extended
checked-in configure script - currently generated in common/autoconf,
but intended for the output directory.

Each allowed/accepted variant is defined/declared as a sub-directory of
an optional configurable root directory (by default, this is posited as
common/autoconf/jdk-variants).

If the root directory doesn't exist or is empty, then a warning will be
generated and the default build variant will be as now i.e. normal.
Otherwise, i.e. if the root directory is non-empty, then each
sub-directory defines the name of an accepted/allowed build variant.

Each build variant directory may contain zero, or more, of the
following ...
. Executable pre-configure script(s) (preconf*) - script(s) to be
  run, in sorted order, before the generated-configure.sh script is
  run.
. build specific autoconf script(s) - which are included into the
  autoconf run by the dynamically generated script.
. Executable post-configure script(s) (postconf*) - script(s) to be
  run, in sorted order, after the generated-configure.sh script has
  been run.


I'm sure that there'll be comments, which I welcome and
indeed, anticipate :-)

TIA & rgds ,


-- 

Dave Pointon FIAP MBCS

Now I saw, tho' too late, the folly of beginning a work before we count
the cost and before we we judge rightly of our strength to go thro'
with it - Robinson Crusoe