Re: [reSIProcate] trunk migrated to autotools build system (r9487)
On 16/04/12 20:18, Adam Roach wrote:
> I think I sent my earlier message too quickly. The information at the
> end of INSTALL doesn't seem quite correct either, as it continues to
> refer to the old build system as well.
The change in documentation is probably the last stage of the conversion
and I make no claim that these are the final documents, as there are
details still to be fine tuned. E.g. Scott had a play with it and
suggested making some components optional, so I did that. Now you can
do things like
./configure --with-apps
All these new things have to be documented before a 1.8 release.
> I'm also, as an autotools non-expert, quite confused about what I need
> to do to go from a virgin checkout to a working binary. The README file
> needs to be updated to reflect this process.
The INSTALL file is also very brief: for example, in step (a), it tells
you to run autoreconf. I could add more details, for example, you need
to make sure your system has autoconf and automake packages already, e.g.
# apt-get install autoconf automake libtool
...
$ autoreconf --install
There is also a question of giving the right information to the right
audience. I don't have access to stats from the web server, but has
anyone looked at them to work out the percentage of users who follow
trunk, compared to the number of users who just use the tarballs?
People using the tarballs don't need to worry about step (a) from the
document, and if anything, we don't want them to execute autoreconf
unless they really know they want to do so.
In some projects, they keep a document for people using tarballs, and a
separate document for people following trunk.