[referencer] Basic question

[Glen Shennan]

Overwhelmingly helpful response, thank you!  I did suspect that this would
be a waste of my time but I do need to find out what's going on some level,
the compilation procedure is all just dark to me right now.  I'll have a
flick through the manual.

Glen

On 31 March 2011 23:48, John Spray <jcspray at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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>>
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