[Protux-devel] autostuff stuff

[Martin Herren]

Hej,

some remarks about autostuff in mustuxlib/protux.


1) autostuff in Mustuxlib:
--------------------------
The check for alsa is currently done as follow:
        AC_CHECK_LIB(asound,main,alsa_support=yes,alsa_support=no)
I installed alsa from source and it came with a m4 macro
        AM_PATH_ALSA([MINIMUM-VERSION [, ACTION-IF-FOUND [, 
ACTION-IF-NOT-FOUND]]])
in the future it would be good to switch over to this macro, as it will easily 
make it possible to check for a minimum alsa-version.
(futhermore, the current test doesn't check for alsa-includes, that means the 
alsa-dev-package)


2) autostuff in Protux:
-----------------------
The checks for mustuxlib are done as follow:
        AC_CHECK_HEADERS(mustux.h)
        AC_CHECK_LIB(mustux,MustuxApplication)
the problem is that they don't give any error message (beside a 'no') if they 
fail, and don't stop.
As mustux is required, they should exit with a AC_MSG_ERROR() if they fail...
The other problem is that they both fail for me, even if mustux is installed 
and protux compiles fine... so this problem should be fixed first, before 
making ./configure exit if mustux isn't installed ;-)

A suggestion: lots of library (as for example glib) come with a xxx-config 
program, as well as with their xxx.m4 macro to simplify testing the presence of 
the library.
So it would be great to add a mustux-config program and a mustux.m4 script 
providing a AM_PATH_MUSTUX(minimum_version, action_found, action_fail) macro...
(usually these xxx-config programs have the following options:

Usage: glib-config [OPTIONS] [LIBRARIES]
Options:
        [--prefix[=DIR]]
        [--exec-prefix[=DIR]]
        [--version]
        [--libs]
        [--cflags]
Libraries:
        glib
        gmodule
        gthread
)



3) autostuff and admin/stuff:
-----------------------------
The biggest problem seems to be that autostuff and QT don't like each other too 
much :-/ (especially the moc step required to build qt-apps)

For what i understood 'till now, the make -f admin/Makefile.common step does 
basically the following:
 - run aclocal
 - run autoheader
 - run autoconf
 - run automake
 - changes the Makefile.in file to add the moc-rules and dependencies.

I don't know a solution how to get rid of this last step, and thus get rid of 
the whole make -f admin/Makefile.common step (i mean to include the moc-rules 
and dependencies directly into Makefile.am).
The only project i found which uses qt without kde (and without this additional 
build step) is the SoQT widget from the coin3d project, i will try to 
investigate how they solved the problem.


all this autotools seems to be really great, but there is still so much i'll 
have to learn about them ;-)

Martin


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Martin Herren                             +41 (0)79 746 57 83
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