This is an important announcement for everyone who wants to build MonetDB from sources (tar balls and Mercurial). This announcement is only relevant to the "default" branch.
Pretty soon I will commit and push a big change to the way MonetDB is built. This message is a heads-up for that change and contains information on how to build MonetDB in the (near) future.
Currently, in order to build the MonetDB suite, you need to do the following: * build and install buildtools (only if building from Mercurial sources); * build and install MonetDB; * build and install clients; * build and install MonetDB4; * build and install MonetDB5; * build and install sql; * build and install pathfinder; * build and install geom; * build and install java; * build and install python; * build and install testing.
Some of the above are optional, and some variation in the order is possible.
In all cases (except python), building and installing consists of running: * ./bootstrap * .../configure ... * make * make install
This whole process is going to change. Very soon you will need to run the commands * ./bootstrap (not for tar balls) * .../configure ... * make * make install
only once in the top-level directory of the MonetDB suite (well, ./bootstrap has to run there, the other commands can run either there or in a separate build directory (recommended)).
For now, there are no changes to the way the Python module is built.
The advantage of this change is clear: you only need to run these commands once instead of 9 times. This means that both bootstrap and configure will be faster, even though the single instance needs to do a bit more work than any single instance in the old situation (but there were 9 of those).
Another advantage is that things like * make dist (create tar ball) * make rpm (create binary RPM) * make srpm (create source RPM) also need to be run only once for the complete suite. We no longer have a separate Super Source Tar Ball which was just a tar ball containing all the separate source tar balls.
Note that in the old situation, there were a whole bunch of configuration options in the Pathfinder configure. These options have been moved to the top-level configure. It used to be possible to only configure and build Pathfinder. That is now supported by using options on the top-level configure disabling building of MonetDB4 and MonetDB5 subpackages: .../configure --disable-monetdb4 --disable-monetdb5 [pathfinder-specific config options]
Attached is the check-in message that I plan to use (modulo last minute changes).