raptor/notes/external_tools.txt

External Tools used by Raptor
==============================

For the sake of convenience Raptor has been bundled with many of the
fundamental tools and libraries that are needed to bootstrap it from
merely having the source code to being able to use it.

If you have Raptor from an installer then this document is not likely
to be of interest. It's about how one uses Raptor directly from the
source repository.

The benefit of bundling tools with the source is to make it ready to
use on a variety of platforms without having to manually download and
configure many items.

This takes away some complexities and adds others.  In the case of some
tools such as Python or Bash it lead to Raptor keeping a whole copy
in its repository, to be uncompressed and built so as to ensure that
a precise version of that tool was available even if that platform's
default version was not up-to-date enough.

These large compressed archives are not stored efficiently in most
"current" SCMs and the inefficiency grows every time one attempts to
add a new version.

It has become less and less necessary to do this as better project
hosting sites have become available.  It's now possible to let Raptors
own bootstrapping scripts download what they need from a single worldwide
download or from a set of alternatives and feel confident that
the necessary items will always be available.


Tools Needed when Bootstrapping Raptor
---------------------------------------

When one enters $SBS_HOME/util and types "make" to bootstrap Raptor,
it will now not only build tools but actually fetch the source code of
any external ones that it might need.

Examples of external tools:
Python
GNU Bash Shell
GNU Make
"dialog" utility

Download locations are chosen:
1) To be the project's natural home location e.g. the GNU ftp site
2) To have fallback locations where the item can also be found
3) To use http://projects.developer.nokia.com/raptor/files if they cannot
   be obtained any other way

Tools that are created by the makefiles in the util/toolname.mk makefiles
use wget to fetch from a list of alternatives. e.g. in make.mk the line:

MAKE_TAR_URL:=http://mirrors.kernel.org/gnu/make/make-$(RAPTOR_MAKE_VER).tar.bz2 
 http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/gnu/ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/make/make-$(RAPTOR_MAKE_VER).tar.bz2

.... indicates alternative locations to attempt to fetch the gnu make
source from.

Tools Used to Generate Installers
---------------------------------

NSIS installer
--------------

The raptorinstallermaker.py script in util/install-windows now downloads
NSIS.zip which contains a specifically structured version of the NSIS
installer creator.  It has hardcoded alternate source locations for
this file.