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Re: [RFC] Hits/directions to using autoconf and friends in Debian



On Sat, 13 Oct 2001, Raja R Harinath wrote:
> Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@debian.org> writes:
> >> Is there a reason not to use autoreconf?
> > Yes. autoreconf does not know how to handle gettext, libtool,

Well, you should not use autoreconf INSTEAD of an autogen.sh-like script, as
you may need to do a lot more stuff than what autoreconf will ever do in
that script.

This does not mean autogen.sh couldn't be made of a single call to
autoreconf, if that's all a package requires.

> Not really germane right now, but autoreconf will soon support those.
> Support for these will be added soon.

And I suppose it will be done right so as not to screw up royally when
someone needs to give -I somedir to aclocal, etc?  If it cannot autodetect
such things, an autogen.sh script to call it with the proper switches is
still needed.

And the list goes on. e.g.: gettextize itself cannot cope properly with
program code that uses something other than _() to wrap gettext() calls
right now, so you need to use something like sed to fix the resulting
breakage in intl/Makefile* in your autogen.sh script, for example. 

> will never handle these.  However, it should be sufficient to take
> care of more/most of the GNU build system in the near future.

An autogen.sh script must do all the initialization a source tree might need
when exported from a CVS repository.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh



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