Re: [fetchmail-devel] automake migration

[Rob F. <rf...@fu...>]

Matthias Andree wrote:
> I've automake-ified fetchmail,

Sounds scary, but it's something that crossed my mind last night.

> but haven't commited the (huge!) change
> set yet. The reason I've done this before 6.2.6 is that I have been
> unable to compile the current intl/ stuff on Solaris and FreeBSD, and
> haven't been able to fix this. So I was fed up, upgraded gettext,
> switched to automake and voilà it works on SuSE Linux 8.2 x86 (with GCC
> 3.4 and ICC 8.0), on Solaris 8 SPARC (with GCC 3.4 and Sun Workshop) and
> on FreeBSD 4.10 i386.

Awesome!

> A bug the commit would also fix is the generation of text from HTML,
> which can currently create empty files if lynx isn't installed.

I was actually wondering about moving that generation out of the makefile 
and into the makerelease script.  Not sure though.  That was mainly 
prompted by the conversion of the man page to HTML, which requires some 
infrastructure that we're not only not distributing, but isn't all that 
common.  (Mainly the manServer.pl script I added to the dist-tools 
directory.  Note that I don't intend for dist-tools to be included in the 
release, and I hope to move a bunch of Eric's release scripts into there.) 
I figured that if that conversion doesn't work with the distributed 
tarball, it's worth thinking about the same situation with the rest of the 
HTML generation.

> Rob, does this get your OK?

The general idea sounds good, especially the fact that you've tested on 
multiple platforms.  The number of files touched is a bit scary, and I 
have minor reservations about some fringes of the process, but I think we 
can work those out later.

> If you can tell me how to fork a branch and
> commit that stuff to a branch, I'll do that,

Heh, that's an area of svn I haven't explored yet.  Check here for that 
info:  http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
(I'm eagerly awaiting the print release of the book, which should get 
shipped to me when it comes out.)

Unfortunately I'm going on an 8-day camping trip in a couple days and don't 
have time to look closely at this before I go.  So I'll just suggest that 
you go ahead and commit it, but try to commit in coherent chunks if 
possible.  That is, see if you can separate the automake stuff, the HTML 
generation, and the gettext stuff.  I understand if that's not really 
possible though.

Meanwhile, be sure to test actually running the result.  (Argh, I still 
have to figure out how to deal with the torturetest server list, with its 
unpublishable passwords.)

And I encourage everyone else to test building and running too.

> Building it after "autoreconf -is" with the software mentioned below
> works for me:
>
> This is what the new README.svn file reads:
> | In order to be able to build from the subversion repository (working
> | directory), some files need to be (re-)generated.

It might be good to create a "bootstrap" script that removes that cache 
directory and does the autoreconf.  And then change the makerelease script 
to call that instead of "aclocal && autoconf".

> A      dist-tools/Makefile.am

I wouldn't think we'd need a makefile there.

> D      intl/ChangeLog
> D      intl/Makefile.in
> D      intl/VERSION
> D      intl/bindtextdom.c
.... and so on

Where's this intl functionality now?

-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rf...@fu...> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"