[zeromq-dev] Autoconf version requirements

[Pieter Hintjens]

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Martin Lucina <mato at kotelna.sk> wrote:

> Again, is there an issue with the actual release tarballs?

Until about an hour ago the Java binding needed 2.1.x...

> Can you not build zeromq (2.0.x or 2.1.x) from a tarball produced with
> "make dist" on a sufficiently new distribution?

Yes, this would work but it's not on the 'unsurprising' path for
someone building from the website instructions.  If we know what we're
doing, we stick to a modern Linux with everything already installed.

Anyhow, the experiment was to chuck 4 random developers in 3 languages
at Google and say, "make the hello world client/server work", and
observe the results...

It was fairly painful to watch:

- Everyone was confused by having to install 0MQ core before the
language bindings, so I added explanatory text to the language
bindings template page.
- One guy ended up trying to install m4 by hand before I stopped him
- Every Java user tried first to build the normal package and then got
compile errors
- There were several small errors (or version differences, not sure)
in the Java and Python instructions on zeromq.org
- Java developers were surprised to need MSVC on Windows, but when I
added links to the free VC++ Express, they got things working.
- They installed MSVS without varchars32.bat, which caused the Python
build to break.
- There is some weirdness with g++ 4.0.x that break the 'c' script
used for C++ examples
- Overall there seem to be a 'lot of pieces' to install before anything works
- The Download .zip from the main repo claims it's 2.0.9 when in fact
it's 2.1.0 internally.
- etc.

Obviously providing Windows installers would help part of that.  But
we still end up sending people to github too often, where they get
lost in a tricky maze of autoconfs and downloads.

-
Pieter