Auto-everything
Before the dawn of time, we had an idea of how Makefiles might work in a heterogeneous environment. Well, nice try. We said “make {bin,lib} and Platform-specific subdirs, put generated files there…” that sort of worked for a while, but is a real pain now.
The world and PHENIX has moved on to autoconf and automake, and so should we. Except X11, I’m not aware of any open-source project (where you can see what’s going on) that doesn’t use it.
The DAQ packages make the phoncs account special - online monitoring, for example, cannot be run from the phoncs account, by and large. All newer packages, ET, the ET servers, event libs, logbook, LVL2, all is automakified.
I counted 5 important plain Makefiles still in use, which are (by virtue of being the DAQ) a one-platform show and really simple to auto-make.
No more symlinks or R3.0.1 version nightmares. Remember that we added features to the ET and Event libs almost weekly, without any problems.
If we leave phoncs0 alone, let’s convert the other packages to automake when we consolidate R3.01into a frozen release. It’s not hard to do.