-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Saturday 28 February 2004 11:56 pm, Cincai Patron wrote:
Yes, using GNU auto tools may be confusing for ant user. With ant, only one file (build.xml) is needed.
I found autotools confusing before I ever looked at a build.xml. The book I was looking at when I gave up on trying was: http://sources.redhat.com/autobook I'll check again, but the last time I tried to use the examples, they were simply wrong. Looking in the documentation for the tools did little to clarify what was wrong with them.
With auto tools, there are actually two steps: one is wether you need "configure" script, and the other one is the "Makefile" script.
To generate "configure", you'll need to manually create configure.in and use autoconf, whereas for "Makefile", you'll need to create Makefile.am and use automake.
Then there's the issue of config.h. I believe all open source C/C++ software should build by untarring the source and typing ./configure && make && make install. Any options should be, well, optional. That is ./configure --help should only be necessary if I want to change the default /usr/local/app-name - --prefix, etc. Ant has its ideosyncrasies, but, from my experience, Ant has the advantage that I was able to make it work for me, whereas, I have yet to be very successful with Autotools. As I say, I'll try again. I'm not sure where autogen and pkg-config fit into this picture. There are also libtool and libtoolize as well as autoheader, autoscan, autoupdate, etc. Then there's Makefile.am verses Makefile.ac. Or is that configure.am verses configure.ac?
Check out this book: http://sources.redhat.com/autobook It uses older auto tools, but the concept is still the same. I might start here: http://inti.sourceforge.net/tutorial/libinti/autotoolsproject.html
Regards, Verdi
I'm really not trying to be difficult, or to find fault for the sake of it. I'm just a bit frustrated with the time it's taking me to become productive in C++ compared to what I can already do in Java. STH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAQYQAwX61+IL0QsMRAqNpAJ9qeBkjCeiXZQtaNtIv4SooQ9neNACfRiRS xQAd4R1pWJAOP3UJ5f9dxv0= =ZX/4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----