[Box Backup] autoconf (was Re: 0.08PLUS3)

[Ben Summers]

On 8 Dec 2004, at 18:36, Martin Ebourne wrote:

> Ben Summers <ben@fluffy.co.uk> wrote:
>> To be honest, I'm scared at all the changes which will be necessary,
>> and can't see any easy way around the binary / library / test 
>> structure
>> of the project without lots of scary sub targets.
>
> I'm sure the current directory layouts would not be hard to preserve. 
> As for
> the way the targets work in the test directories it's quite possible it
> would be necessary to change how they work currently. I'm sure we 
> could come
> up with a scheme which would be perfectly functional.
>
> After all, change might be scary, but that doesn't make it bad.

It's more an issue of whether the time might be best spent doing 
something else.

[snip]
> Having done some more reading, then as I understand it you would need 
> the
> following cygwin packages on a windows machine only to BUILD an 
> autoconf'd
> box:
>
> Bourne shell
> GNU M4
> GNU Make
> Perl
>
> You don't need autoconf because that's done by the source packager. The
> resulting build does not need to have any cygwin dependencies, which 
> seems
> to be the main criterion.

Yes, I don't mind having Cygwin required to build if the binaries are 
Win32 native without dependencies.

Might an easier way forward be to use autoconf to detect the platform's 
requirements and generate the compile lines, then use the existing 
build system to take these and use them in the generated build scripts?

Ben