1 November 2004
Libtool
When looking into the libtool problem I mentioned earlier, I decided to
take a look at the libtool-2.0 betas. Overall, it looks pretty good.
I've updated the
gnome-common autogen.sh
script to support it. So if a package uses the LT_INIT macro, it will
call libtoolize for you.
One of the new features in these versions of libtool is that if you have
a AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR(directory) call in your configure.ac file, it
will copy the libtool M4 macros to that directory. If you then call
aclocal with the correct -I flag, autoconf will use that version of
the macro.
This means that you will get consistent versions of ltmain.sh and
libtool.m4, which is a lot more reliable. With the old setup, the
version of ltmain.sh you got would depend on $PATH while the version
of libtool.m4 would depend on the aclocal search path. With the new
setup, it just depends on $PATH.
The only problem is that aclocal doesn't automatically check the
macro dir for macros. This is pretty easy to work around. Just pass the
appropriate -I flag to aclocal in autogen.sh, and make sure
ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS gets set appropriately in your Makefile.am's. This
second part can be done from the configure.in file like so:
AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR([m4])
...
# make sure $ACLOCAL_FLAGS are used during a rebuild.
AC_SUBST([ACLOCAL_AMFLAGS], ["-I $ac_macro_dir \${ACLOCAL_FLAGS}"])
(the above will also pass $ACLOCAL_FLAGS to aclocal on a rebuild,
which is expected when building most Gnome packages).
I also updated the gnome-common autogen.sh script to check for
AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR, and call aclocal correctly, so a package
maintainer doesn't need to do anything special.
This system could benefit some of the other Gnome related build tools
like intltool and gtk-doc — I recently got CC'd on an intltool bug
that seemed to be caused by mismatched macros and support files, so
people are tripping over the problem. It should be pretty trivial to
modify intltoolize to check for AC_CONFIG_MACRO_DIR, and copy over
the macro file if it finds it. This wouldn't affect its behaviour on
existing packages, but would be more reliable on packages that have been
updated to use the macro.
I did some initial Fedora Core 2 packages for Bazaar (a new GNU Arch command line tool sponsored by Canonical). It is only an i386 build, but I'll add an x86-64 build once I have FC2 or FC3 set up on my desktop (so far I've only got round to installing Ubuntu/AMD64 on it).
At the moment baz is quite similar to tla, but there are some
promising interface
ideas that should make
it a lot nicer to use. If you've avoided Arch due to tla's
complexity, baz might be worth trying when it develops further.