Re: Constantly changing libtool

[Thomas Jahns]

Hi Laurence,

from what I can see, you are trying to solve an issue outside the scope 
autotools, which are AFAIK used in two contexts successfully:

1. users are provided a combination of source program and autotools 
generated files, and, unless they want to change the build system 
itself, have no need to worry about the autotools underpinnings but just 
run configure and make.

2. users receive source without autotools artifacts and are expected to 
run autotools at least once successfully.

Scenario 1. is obviously not helpful if people are expected to also 
change the build system to e.g. include new files. In scenario 2. more 
work than absolutely needed might be expected of users.

It seems your approach is somewhere in between: you supply 
autotools-generated files but expect users to also run autotools. I 
think you can improve outcomes by setting minimum version requirements 
in configure.ac so the consistency of the dev environment improves but 
that would probably not take care of all issues with e.g. new gcc versions.

My suggestion would be to supply more than just the sources: consider 
handing out virtual machine images or docker containers. Doing so would 
enable you to keep much more under control than only the sources. Users 
would receive a complete environment that's almost guaranteed to produce 
identical results to what you prepared for lectures/hands-on sessions.

Thomas Jahns


On 4/15/21 4:41 PM, Laurence Marks wrote:
> As you say, it has files generated by autotools in a cvs (anonymous), so
> when checking out there is a clash.
>
> ---
> The software is at http://www.numis.northwestern.edu/Software/, mainly edm
> & semper-7.0beta. They are both old, not so great but I still use them
> every year or so for teaching, and there are a few others who use them.
> They are updated via cvs (yes, they are that old). I am updating them
> currently (for a class) so they may be changing.
>
> At least for edm most of the problems are with fftw-2.1.5 (
> http://www.fftw.org/download.html) which is also somewhat old. (Updating
> the code to use more recent fftw would be a pain.)
>
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2021 at 9:27 AM Peter Johansson <trojkan@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi Laurence,
> >
> > On 15/4/21 6:35 am, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > > Most problems seem to stem from packages providing the generated files
> > > from Autoconf, Automake, and libtool so that end users don't need to
> > > have the tools available.
> >
> > It will be easier for people here to help if you provide a bit more
> > information about your set-up. Is the problem when building from a
> > tarball or when building from git/subversion? If the latter, do have you
> > checked in files generated by autotools into git/subversion, so when
> > checking out/cloning the source to a system with other autotools
> > versions, there becomes a clash between versions?
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Peter


--
Thomas Jahns
HPC-Gruppe
Abteilung Anwendungssoftware

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