Re: gnu autoconf

[coryb at jawbone.csd.sgi.com (Cory Bennett)]

On Mar 13, 10:33am, Marcel Ruff wrote:
>> You have testet it with SGI and Linux, possibly
> Heinrich Götzger could cross-check it on his HPUX.
>
> If Heinrich has time to do so, he could contact you
> to get the autoconf pieces.

THere are a ton of little pieces for autoconf.  There needs to be a
'Makefile.am' file in each directory and configure.in file at the top level
(and maybe more if there are sub directories which need a specialized
configuration that cant be done via Makefiles.  There are some other extraneous
requirements which automake needs before it can run like an "AUTHORS" and
"ChangeLog" file.  Automake doens't actually uses those files, so I think they
are required just to make distributions standardized.

> Could you give C++ a try?
> When all parts work fine we should add it to the xmlBlaster cvs tree.
> What happens to the old Makefiles, we could throw them away then, right?
>
> The Makefiles currently do build the documentation as well
> - doc/requirements for the Reference Handbook
> - testsuite/org/xmlBlaster for Java code syntax highlighting
> - xmlBlaster/Makefile for Javadoc

I have not tried to build any documentation, and I dont know about hte syntax
highlighting bit.  I am sure it is do-able.  But it will all take some time to
investigate.  I wanted to make sure people were interested before I did
anything more.

> I often thought to cleanup the xmlBlaster root directory from all
> build make etc. stuff over the next releases,
> is it possible to put the autonf thingies into the xmlBlaster/conf
> directory?

Well, it might actually get more cluttered ... but in a more standard way :)
The autoconf/automake requirements are pretty strict.  Many files need to be in
the top level directory, so I dont think xmlBlaster/conf is an option.  We
would be able to get rid of a few files, but probably be adding more.  But the
files we would be adding are the ones people always look for anyway like
'configure'.

-Cory