Re: pspp development

[John Darrington]

On Sun, Nov 07, 2004 at 02:09:11PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     >
     > I just took a first glance in the src directory, and
     > I already have a suggestion you might have thought of:
     > Make more subdirectories. PSPP, if it grows to include 
     > most of the procedures currently in SPSS, will have 
     > hundreds of megabytes of source, so putting each routine
     > in its own directory will make it more readable.
     
     Yes, this is a good idea.  I actually meant to do this much
     earlier (years ago) but Automake wasn't quite ready for it at the
     time.  I think that we're getting toward time to give it another
     shot.

I agree too.  But first I'd recommend reading the paper 
http://www.tip.net.au/~millerp/rmch/recu-make-cons-harm.html which
points out a serious problem which could arise if not considered.
Fortunately, the recent versions of automake address this, but it
means that a different mindset is needed when writing the Makefile.am
     
     (If there's some reason to introduce "plug-ins" into a program,
     then that's another reason to use shared libraries.)

I'm of the opinion that the reason SPSS does this is so they can
charge $$$ per plugin.

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