Re: [avrdude-dev] Documentation build tools requirements -many complaints

[Brian Dean]

On Sun, Feb 06, 2005 at 01:51:19PM +1300, Alex Shepherd wrote:

> Well have managed to get the build system to fully configure/compile
> under Cygwin on Windows so I would have thought it should not be too
> hard for many others - especially on a UNIX variant. :))

FreeBSD and Mac OS X at least do not ship by default with the tools
needed.  The FreeBSD ports system allows easy installation of the
needed tools, but it is bandwidth intensive and time consuming to
obtain and build them if you didn't have them previously installed.
There may be lighter weight alternatives.

The same tools are available on Mac OS X but the bandwidth needed and
time to build them is similar of course.  I generally use the Darwin
Ports mechanism to install this kind of thing if the port is available
there.  If not, I do it the old fashioned way :-)

The main issue is that installing the tools to build the doc is orders
of magnitude more time consuming and difficult that building avrdude
itself.

> However it would be nice if the configure process could detect the
> presence or absence of the required doc tools and alter behaviour
> accordingly. In the past I have resorted to editing the makefile in
> the doc dir so that it does nothing to get around these problems.

I just now fiddled around with the Makefile.am file and removed 'doc'
from SUBDIRS and DIST_SUBDIRS before running the bootstrap or the
configure.  That appears to do the right thing in that doc is not
built by default.  One can still build the doc by cd'ing into the doc
directory and typing make, it's just not built if you don't do that
step manually.

-Brian