Re: autotools automake autoconf

[Miles Bader]

"Ron Baker,    Pluralitas!" <stoshu@bellsouth.net.po> writes:
>> The one really stupid part though is the rigmarole of running the
>> various programs in the right order (as you seemed to have been asking
>
> That doesn't sound "dead simple" to me.  ;)

Well, writing the input files is dead simple -- it's only this little
stupidity in command invocation that interferes with the fun.

> I'm not up to speed on the "--foreign" option yet.  The documents I
> have only say that it eases off on the GNU standards.  I have no idea
> what the real consequences of that are?

There are various files that are supposed to be in any GNU program
distribution, like INSTALL, README, ChangeLog, AUTHORS, etc.

By default, automake will bitch at you if it doesn't see them.
--foreign makes automake shut up about this.

>>    AUTOMAKE="automake --foreign" autoreconf -i
>
> What is that?
> Is that an alias?  An environment variable?

It just sets the environment variable AUTOMAKE to "automake --foreign"
and then runs autoreconf -i (when autoreconf tries to run automake, it
will run the command in that environment variable instead if it exists).
You can presumably achieve the same thing by setting the AUTOMAKE
environment variable via other means, if your shell doesn't support the
above syntax (which is sh/bash syntax).

-Miles

-- 
"An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a proof that there
can't be a god.  He only has to be someone who believes that the evidence
on the God question is at a similar level to the evidence on the werewolf
question."  [John McCarthy]