Re: [eboard-devel] configure

[Felipe B. <be...@se...>]

On Mon, 24 May 2004, Daniel Burrows wrote:

>   It's probably too late, but after a long delay I've downloaded the new
> eboard version to make Debian packages, and...

even Mac OS X has binary packages for 0.9.5 for months now, but I'll skip
the debian slowness jokes.

>
>   OH MY GOD THEY KILLED CONFIGURE!
>
>   Excuse the rant, but...why has the standard "configure" script been
> replaced by a half-baked hack that makes it impossible to cleanly
> override settings for packaging?  For instance,

because auto* + gettext stuff were taking almost 200K of the .tar.bz2
source files, and every time I wanted to do some test I had to read the
half-baked documentation on automake and pray that I were writing correct
m4 code.

Also, automake 1.6 and 1.7 were giving odd conflicts on my system (problem
gone now that I upgraded the distro).

For your reference:

553703   Jul  7  2003   eboard-0.9.0.tar.bz2
360241   Nov 26  2003   eboard-0.9.5.tar.bz2

gettext and auto* are half-baked and bloated, and I'd rather cope with my
own, small and efficient half-baked solution than keep fighting other
people's bloated half-baked solution.

>   So if I want data files in /usr/share/games, as required by Debian
> policy, I get to patch configure and hope my patches don't break across
> versions.  "configure --datadir=/usr/share/games" won't work, nor will

If you send me the patch, the patch gets included in the next versions
(whenever they happen - I've got new italian and japanese translations
sitting on my mailbox, and I'd like to fix 3 or 4 issues (mouse
scroll on the console, crashes on xboard v1 engines like phalanx,
board discarding when observing on FICS and some other things I
don't remember from the top of the head now) before releasing next
version, which hopefully will be 1.0.0)

> "make datadir=/usr/share/games".  I also can't override CXXFLAGS, because
> instead of just specifying compile flags it also specifies include paths;
> "make CXXFLAGS=-O2" will result in the compile bombing out.  Oh, and
> trying to install to a staging directory, with "make prefix=foo
> install", won't work because the Makefiles are generated with "prefix"
> already replaced by its value; I have to override all the *dir variables
> directly.

that can be fixed. It's not there in my configure-from-scratch because I
didn't know it was needed. When I have a configure with those issues
solved, I'll send you a test version before releasing a public eboard
version.

Unlike Kenny, autoconf's configure isn't going to come back from the dead.
Not this season, at least.

.........................................................................
Felipe Paulo Guazzi Bergo - Computer Science PhD Student at Unicamp
be...@se... - Campinas - SP - Brazil - Earth
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