Re: [patch]: automatically buiding rpm (and others) with automake

[Christophe Tronche]

[...]

> > In the configure.ac, chances are that you've something like:
> > 
> > AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(autopack, 0.1.1)
> > 
> > You've to add this (for example):
> > 
> > AP_INIT_AUTOPACK(An automake package generation module,
> >         0,
> >         GPL,
> >         Applications/Multimedia,
> >         Christophe Tronche <address@hidden>,
> >         http://gnu.org/automake/,
> >         [This is an extension to automake to let make build
> >         effortlessly (hopefully !) packages such as RPM, .deb, System
> >         V, etc... packages. To use this, put AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS =
> >         package-xxx in your Makefile.am])
> >

address@hidden:

> I guess the only thing that concerns me right now is that the list of 
> positional
> parameters in AP_INIT_AUTOPACK might become a little unwieldy in future as we
> add further options, many of which are specific to particular packagers. Could
> we do it with a bunch of separate macros, e.g.
> 
> AP_INIT_AUTOPACK
> AP_INFO_LICENSE("GPL")
> AP_INFO_AUTHOR("Christophe Tronche <address@hidden>")
> ...
> 
> Options that aren't specified could take sensible defaults (certain options
> would presumably be mandatory) or if they really need to be specified for a
> particular packager, that package target could fail with an error if the 
> option
> has not been defined.

Actually my idea was this: assume that there's a set of parameters
that are enough to build packages with any packaging software
supported by autopack (an idea that you may or may not buy), you force
the writer of configure.ac to fill every necessary parameter so that
any packaging will succeed, even if you may ignore some parameters
with some packagers. The fact that EPM uses a small set of parameters
is in my opinion a hint that this should work, but again, this is
something not everyone may agree upon...

-- 
Christophe Tronche      address@hidden
                        http://tronche.com/