Installation of Ice

[stephan]

Hi!

I was observing installation difficulties for Ice in installing Linux for some people.

Late installations of Linux distributions sometimes don't come with BerkeleyDB or OpenSSL installed unfortunately, so patching the system can get a tedious task (this is just an observation).
As only plain-Ice is needed for this installation (no Freeze etc. required), I wonder why I would need BerkeleyDB and OpenSSL at all.

While readline and ncurses usage is switchable, I could unfortunately not find any switches I could place to allow not to build Freeze or the SSL support.

Would it e.g. be sufficient to remove the two directories from the subdirs list in the top Makefile?

Or could you introduce additional switches to the build system in future versions to lower the number of interdependencies to 3rd party libraries?

cheers,

Stephan

[benoit]

Yes, if you don't want to build Freeze, you can simply remove it from the following Makefiles:

src/Makefile
test/Makefile
demo/Makefile

If you want to run the test suite without Freeze, you will also have to comment out the Freeze tests from allTests.py.

The other option is to just go into each source directory in the src directory and build only what you need (knowning that Ice depends on IceUtil and all the services depend on Ice and some depend on Freeze).

readline is optional because of licensing issues (see the comment in config/Make.rules).

I'm not sure if making BerkeleyDB and/or OpenSSL optional is worth the added complexity, it's quite simple already to build only few bits of the Ice source distribution .

Benoit.