[java-gnome-hackers] [Help] Autoconf developer wanted

[Mark H. <mh...@ca...>]

Hi,

If nobody disagrees, I would like to senf this to -developer and
hopefully Jeff will also consider adding it as a job request on
sourceforge.

Hello,
  
The Java-Gnome project produces a set of bindings of the core Gnome
developer platform for the Java language. We have recently joined the
official Gnome Bindings Release and as part of this have made a large
overhaul of our repository structure and build system. We have a working
build system but none of us are experts or even experienced in the GNU
autoconf/make tools so there are a few areas where we could do with
help.

Our current build process:
From our repository, we release an all-in-one tarball, plus several
separate tarballs (one for each module). Each tarball has it's own
configure script and make files. Since these have many sections in
common, we generate the actual Makefile.in and configure.in files from
shared files and *.in.in files using a very simple perl script.

The makefiles themselves then compile java-gnome, which involves
compiling java source files to java bytecode and native code (with gcj),
compiling c source files (jni files) and also packaging everything into
a jar file and shared libraries. This part of the build process works
well.

What we want help with:
(in decreasing order of priority)

Modifying the configure script so that any java compiler can be used. At
the moment, we default to javac and allow kaffe with a configure time
option. GNU autoconf-archive has a macro which is supposed to do this,
but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work (it wasn't setting the
JAVA_CFLAGS variable).  Instead, we're using a macro which is very
inflexible and looks like it is a hack of a hack.

For the separate module tarballs, e.g. libgnome-java, we need to locate
libraries which would have been produced by the other tarballs, such as
libgtk2.5-java.so. At the moment, these are hand coded to the default
installation locations. It would be good if this could be configurable.

It would be helpful if we had more parts of the process configurable.
For example, if we could say configure --nodocs so that documentation
does not get generated.

In general, having somebody who knows what they're doing look over our
build system and suggesting any improvements which could be made would
be very reassuring


If you have experience with the standard GNU tools, we really would like
to hear from you. Any help you may offer would be very much appreciated.
A little knowledge of java would be helpful but is in no way necessary.
We will be able to give lots of help if you need it.


-- 
  .''`. Mark Howard
 : :' :
 `. `'  http://www.tildemh.com 
   `-   mh...@de... | mh...@ti... | mh...@ca...