Re:20 years as a Debian maintainer
by snuxoll on Monday January 09, 2017 @11:42AM
(#13357604)
You don't have to use autotools, but it makes doing the right thing easy. If you want to use CMake (I much prefer it myself!) just make sure you use pkg-config, same with scons or whatever. These are all included in Fedora's (my distro of choice) package collection and there's no trouble using them to build.
But please, if you decide to bundle third party libraries make sure you can build without them and use ones provided by the system instead. It's a political nightmare to include packages with bundled libraries because it makes security updates a huge headache since we can't simply rely on Anitya (https://release-monitoring.org/distro/Fedora/) to send us notifications that a new release of the library is available, not to mention the extra work of actually updating the bundled library once we do find out an update has been published.
Re:20 years as a Debian maintainer
by BuuQu9hu on Monday January 09, 2017 @07:48PM
(#13361528)
It is best to not bundle third party libraries, instead, have your build system check if the libs are installed and if they aren't then download and build them. rleigh mentions below that cmake can do that.
But please, if you decide to bundle third party libraries make sure you can build without them and use ones provided by the system instead. It's a political nightmare to include packages with bundled libraries because it makes security updates a huge headache since we can't simply rely on Anitya (https://release-monitoring.org/distro/Fedora/) to send us notifications that a new release of the library is available, not to mention the extra work of actually updating the bundled library once we do find out an update has been published.