[PATCH phosphor-host-ipmid] Initial autotools support

[Joel Stanley]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 2:02 PM, Stewart Smith
<stewart at linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> OpenBMC Patches <openbmc-patches at stwcx.xyz> writes:
>> This switches us over to use autotools rather than custom makefiles.
>> This brings us into line with the defacto standard for building
>> userspace.
>
> I haven't converted everything yet, and I've really only started to poke
> at what makes sense for the current structure of everything.
>
> There's a magic thing we could use for plugins too, which allows in tree
> and out of tree, and I haven't started using it.
> See https://autotools.io/libtool/plugins.html
>
> But first I wanted to raise the possibility of autotools and what it
> kind of looks like.
>
> We should also move to explicit exposure of symbols rather than
> exporting everything.
>
> thoughts?

Looks like a good start. Thanks!

There are two things I think we want to look at. You mentioned the
first; making sure the structure makes sense. This means double
checking our reasons for the separate git repositories, as well as the
directory structure within repositories. We want a sensible strucutre
so the code is easy to understand, to release, maintain as well as
test and hack on.

The second is to see what changes we can make to reduce the footprint
of the distribution. It looks like we're moving to 32MB flash for the
systems we are using, so that alleviates the problem somewhat, but it
would be good to make sure we're not bloated for bloat sake.

Cheers,

Joel