Re: [Audacity-devel] Autoconf macros

[Federico G. <gr...@rf...>]

On Mon, Mar 24, 2008 at 08:41:25PM +0000, Richard Ash wrote:
> As a result of trying in to integrate Brian's patches for using the Sun
> C compiler, I'm trying to review how we do C flags in the configure
> script. This basically means not assuming that we are using GCC, and
> only adding compiler flags that we either test work, or are figured out
> by the script to be valid for the compiler.
> 
> Anyhow, the upshot of this is that the autoconf macro archive has
> ready-made macros for many of these tests. They are under various open
> source licenses, or all under GPL3. The ones I am proposing to use are
> all GPL2 + extension clause which allows the use of the resulting script
> for anything.
> Using these will make for a much more flexible configure script. The
> question is what do we do about the m4 macro sources? The options are
> either to rely on anyone running autoconf to have them installed on
> their system, or to copy them into the audacity source tree.
> 
> I'm not in favour of putting them into audacity CVS, because having them
> on the system is less maintenance, and saves on distributing files that
> most people won't use. There seem to be distribution packages for most
> places, and being non-compiled they are usually easy enough to install.
> Without them, you can run configure, but you can't convert configure.in
> into configure.
> 
> Richard
> 

Sounds like this is a "developer" issue for people who will hack at autoconf
tools, essentially making the m4 macros a "build dependency".  This sounds
reasonable if the macros are stable are already packaged (much like soundtouch
or wx are build dependencies).  Do you have a URL / package for the m4 macros
in question? Am I correct in understanding that people looking at other areas
of the code should still be able to download a tarball (or cvs) and do a
standard audacity compile using the existing configure file.

donfede

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Federico Grau
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