[Plplot-devel] AT status report

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Just to remind you, my primary motivation for the AT (autotools) project
(revived AM-LT) is to allow us to build our libraries and dynamic drivers in
a manner that works cross-platform.  There are all sorts of other compelling
benefits that Rafael has mentioned as well, but what really makes me
confident that this is the way to go is that major projects such as KDE use
autotools, and I therefore think it should satisfy our needs as well.

I have now completed a light reading through the autotools book, a quick
(although somewhat dated) cookbook recommended by Rafael,
http://tinf2.vub.ac.be/~dvermeir/manuals/autocookbook/cookbook.html, the
info pages for libtool and automake, and Rafaels AM-LT comments to
plplot_devel and his AM-LT commit messages.  Thus, today I thought it was
time to get my hands dirty by actually trying to reproduce the situation
where he left off one and a half years ago.

I quickly found that the old AM-LT branch had been badly contaminated
(presumably during Rafael's merges from the MAIN branch to AM-LT) by files
from the CVS attic, i.e, files that had been removed from CVS.  There is
some warning about this "issue" (I would call it a bug) in info cvs if you
use static tags rather than branch tags during merges.  However, by going
over Rafael's old commit messages I was able to get a list of files that he
had actually changed or created as part of the AM-LT effort so it was
possible to make a clean start by merging those specific files with a clean
branch without the "removed" files interfering with that branch.

The new AT branch created this way (in a recent copy of the repository I
established on my home machine to avoid mucking with the SF version until I
gained a bit more experience with cvs branching and merging) works as
advertised by Rafael.  This particular clean start was based on the MAIN
branch from one and a half years ago with the specific AM-LT files merged
in.  I was able to build and install libraries and one (non-functional,
since this was for plplot before the dynamic drivers merge) driver *.so.
Obviously, there is still lots left to do.  For example, I have no idea
whether the installed libraries actually work since there are no examples,
no functioning drivers, and all the script language front ends are not built
or installed for now.  But at least I seem to have reproduced pretty much
the situation (without all the extra "removed" files) when Rafael had to
drop the AM-LT project.  For example, all the builds just worked without
error.

The next step tomorrow is to do a similar clean start of an AT branch at
SourceForge based this time on the current CVS HEAD merged with specific
AM-LT files rather than the merge with PLplot from one and a half years ago.
After I get that build to work, my next priorities are the dynamic drivers,
and the c examples to make sure those libraries and drivers work on Linux.

Alan

email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902	FAX: 250-721-7715
snail-mail:
Dr. Alan W. Irwin
Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055,
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6
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