[referencer] Basic question

[John Spray]

Oh, so it's building but you want to know about the internals out of
curiosity?  I'd respectfully suggest that your curiosity is misplaced.  Most
people who use autotools (myself included) don't write any of this stuff, it
all just comes off the shelf apart from the configure.in and Makefile.am
files which define what's actually being built.

If you want to learn about build systems then GNU autotools is a bad one to
learn.  It's ubiquitous for historical reasons, not because there's anything
beautiful about it.  If you are starting from scratch then you should skip
autotools and learn CMake or one of the other more modern systems (which
don't involve arcane macro languages!).  If you really truly want to know
all about auto tools then the official documentation [1] is the place.
 However, I can't emphasize enough what overwhelmingly poor use of your time
it would be to do so.

John

1.
http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Autotools-Introduction


On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Glen Shennan <glen.shennan at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Thanks for the reply.  I was told earlier to build the source with
> ./autogen.sh && make which worked (or seemed to).  Now I'm trying to work
> out what that script is doing, which is calling gnome-autogen.sh which in
> turns does something with config.in and m4/python.m4.  Unfortunately
> gnome-autogen.sh and python.m4 are long and look complicated and I have no
> idea what an m4 macro is anyway so what is going on here is confusing me a
> bit.  I guess I'm just not sure what's happening in the ./configure and make
> steps, I'm from DOS so a command like make with no arguments is not natural
> to me.  If the whole thing is complicated I guess I'm just looking for a
> good source for documentation; I'm making my way through the relevant
> sections of the gnome documentation library but the m4 macro home page is
> gibberish to me at the moment.  "Expanding macros" is not yet in my
> vocabulary and I'm wondering if there's a way to learn what's going on in
> this process without reading to much bash script (which I'm also still
> learning) since I don't think it's too relevant to referencer itself.
>
> Cheers,
> Glen
>
>
>
> On 31 March 2011 22:28, John Spray <jcspray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Glen,
>>
>> What you're looking at is a standard GNU autotools build setup.  You build
>> it with ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make.  If you haven't done this kind
>> of thing before then you probably don't have the required packages, look at
>> the list of dependencies at [1].
>>
>> (Presumably you've checked this out of version control: the difference
>> between what's in version control and what's in a release tarball is simply
>> that for the tarball the "autogen.sh" step was already run.)
>>
>> John
>>
>> 1. http://icculus.org/referencer/development.html
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 5:53 AM, Glen Shennan <glen.shennan at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm very new at this and trying to work my way through the referencer
>>> source.  My C++ is rusty (ore) though and I've never used gnome-autogen.sh.
>>> Is there a good tutorial I can have a look at to see how the
>>> gnome-autogen.sh and python.m4 macros conspire to get this thing compiled?
>>> I've been searching but can't find anything decent and I've learned enough
>>> bash for the moment.  Any quick descriptions are welcome too.  :)
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Glen
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> referencer mailing list
>>> referencer at icculus.org
>>> http://icculus.org/mailman/listinfo/referencer
>>>
>>>
>>
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>>
>
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