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.<br>
<br>Glen<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 31 March 2011 23:48, John Spray <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jcspray@gmail.com" target="_blank">jcspray@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><br></div>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 <a href="http://configure.in" target="_blank">configure.in</a> and Makefile.am files which define what's actually being built.<div>
<br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>John</div><div><br></div><div>1. <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Autotools-Introduction" target="_blank">http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Autotools-Introduction</a> </div>
<div><div></div><div>
<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Glen Shennan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:glen.shennan@gmail.com" target="_blank">glen.shennan@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hi,<br><br>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 <a href="http://config.in" target="_blank">config.in</a> 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.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br><font color="#888888">Glen</font><div><div></div><div><br><br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On 31 March 2011 22:28, John Spray <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jcspray@gmail.com" target="_blank">jcspray@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Glen,<div><br></div><div>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].</div>
<div><br></div><div>(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.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>John</div><div><br></div><div>1. <a href="http://icculus.org/referencer/development.html" target="_blank">http://icculus.org/referencer/development.html</a></div><div><br></div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
<div><div></div><div>On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 5:53 AM, Glen Shennan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:glen.shennan@gmail.com" target="_blank">glen.shennan@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
</div></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div><div></div><div>Hi,<br><br>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. :)<br>
<br>Cheers,<br><font color="#888888">Glen<br>
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