A new milestone in modular portable programming is ready! The "Slottable Source Plugin Module" system (SSPM) is an idea that really is more than 3 years old but I was hesitating to announce it earlier. Now I can tell you that the new makefile system has been under test during the last 6 months and nobody complained about any problem caused by the SSPM. The portability overhead is currently about 2 MB. This turns a medium sized application like 'star' which is about 500 kB of pure source into a packet that is 5x as big as the pure source size. As all my applications are based on the Schily SING makefile system and share a common portability base it makes sense to share the advantages of the Schily makefile system with all users. Simple ideas like the SSPM are usually hard to understand by people from outside, so I try to describe the new system by giving you an example on how it is used: -------------------- You may test the new system by first downloading the latest cdrtools package ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/cdrtools-1.11a11.tar.gz or newer. Then unpack the source tarball, chdir into the top level directory of the cdrtools package. Run 'make' and wait until the compilation has finished. So far, there is nothing new (except that some people may recognize that this is a 'smooth' fully integrated compilation and you don't need to call 'configure'. Now, to understand what a "Slottable Source Plugin Module" is, fetch another source. There is currently only one demo source that is ready for testing: ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/star/alpha/star-1.4a08-sspm.tar.gz Unpack this tarball in the top level directory of cdrtools and call 'make' again. The Schily makefile system does recognize that there is additional (uncompiled) source and will compile these new parts. As there is no need to run 'configure' again, compilation of the additional 'star' sources is much faster than the compilation of the complete 'star' source package would take. To understand how the "Slottable Source Plugin Module" system works, have a look into the TARGETS directory..... -------------------