On Sun, 2004-09-19 at 10:04, Phil Mattison wrote:
> It occurred to me there could be a viable open source software
> business providing training and support services for a GPL version of
> a VHDL compiler and simulator.

You should check out GEDA also:

http://www.geda.seul.org/

> So the quandary is this: How much effort is justified attempting to
> debug the build process for a totally unknown piece of software?

It really depends on what the software is worth to you.  There is a
piece of software called Hugin -- which allows you to do panoramas with
your photos (very cool).  It is actively developed, but the build
process sucks (especially some of the dependent libraries).  I keep
thinking to myself that I'll redo it for them, but I haven't yet...  it
is alot of work.

> In the process I realized some of the premises behind the whole FOSS
> distribution model. The idea is to distribute source code because that
> can be compiled on the user's system, taking into account at
> compile-time any peculiarities of the user's system. Ignoring for the
> moment the module/library dependency problem, there also seems to be
> significant compiler- and tool-version dependency problems.

Well, even though the source is available, open-source doesn't fix the
whole bitrot problem.  The reality is that system/libaries everything
changes over time.  Which is really the problem.  I'm sure the package
was easy to install on the users who wrote it's system :)

As far as what to use?  The autotools suck, but they seem to do the job
and are the best we have.  There are some really cool features that are
built into the tools themselves, like relocatable installs and builds. 
There are several other systems out there -- but autotools are still the
standard.

As far as worth the effort?  I don't know -- are you going to maintain
it?  If you're not going to maintain it at all, then the same problem
will occur for the next guy.  If you plan on keeping it up-to-date, I'm
sure that someone could use the tool that otherwise couldn't before. 
Especially with VHDL, I'm sure there are some hardware guys that could
never figure out how to build the tool.

Also, I'm sure that you know about opencores.org right?

Good luck, if you do decide to update and have some autotools questions
you should ask those on the plug-devel list.  I can try and answer some,
but there are other people familiar on that list also.

		--Ted