Proposal: Usage of stow in jenkins build scripts

[Alexander Huemer]

Hi,

The osmocom software that I do not install via apt but build myself gets 
installed in $HOME/usr and I do things like:

export PATH="${PATH}:${HOME}/usr/bin"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:${HOME}/usr/lib"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/usr/lib/pkgconfig
MANPATH="${MANPATH}:${HOME}/usr/man"

Therefore I don't have to install to a destination outside my home 
directory which in turn means I can avoid some sudo calls.
But that actually does not matter so much, you can mentally substitute 
$HOME with '/' and append '/local' in the following if you want.

I don't install to $HOME/usr directly but use stow for 'managing' the 
installations, so an installation goes like this:

        $ mkdir -p $HOME/src/telco/osmo/libosmo-abis
        $ cd $HOME/src/telco/osmo/libosmo-abis
        $ git clone git://git.osmocom.org/libosmo-abis
        $ autoreconf -i
        $ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/stow/libosmo-abis
        $ make
        $ make install
        $ STOW_DIR=$HOME/usr/stow stow libosmo-abis

This has two advantages:
* Good visibility of what is installed by a package.
  $ tree $HOME/usr/stow/libosmocore
* Possibility of uninstalling a package even if the Makefile is not 
  present.

For me those two advantages outweigh the small additional effort of 
using stow.

Because of that workflow I sometimes run into situations in which make 
runs fail because either header files are not found during compilation 
or libraries are not found during linking. The reason is that autotools 
variables pointing to pkgconfig supplied directories point to a 
destination under the prefix path with which configure was called. If a 
dependency was not mentioned in a Makefile.am the required files are not 
found because the other dependencies are in other directories.

For a system on which the osmocom-own dependency libs are installed in 
distinct directories, current openbsc master HEAD requires the attached 
patch for a build to succeed.

I admit that in most situations the dependencies are installed in the 
same directory so this does not matter, but it is still a small bug.

Therefore I propose to modify the jenkins build scripts so that they use 
distinct, stow managed directories for the dependencies. That should 
help to detect oversights, although admittedly developers would have to 
adapt their workflows to use stow as well in their daily hacking.
Otherwise an oversight would be detected by jenkings and not locally 
which in turn would require additional cleanup commits which is not so 
nice.

What is your gut feeling? Does the increased correctness of Makefiles.am 
contents justify the (IMO rather small) additional effort of using stow?

Kind regards,
-Alex
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