Re: use of mkoctfile with autoconf/automake

[David Bateman]

Eric Chassande-Mottin wrote:
> hi,
> 
> I'd like to compile a set of DLD codes with automake/autoconf.
> i am trying to understand what octave-forge does.  from
> configure.base, i see that the idea is to "recompose" the compilation
> instructions of mkoctfile. am i right?
> the compiler, options and libs are retrieved from a call "mkoctfile
> -p" for instance :
> 
>   163 CC=`$MKOCTFILE -p CC`
>   [...]
>   169 AC_SUBST(CC)
>   [...]
> 
> if this is true, why can't i find a statement retrieving the includes
> ? i've probably missed something here...
> 
> second question: I am not able to find the Makefile.ams (there are only
> Makefile.in). why is that?
> 
> if , then I expect the following Makefile.am to be OK :
> 
> bin_PROGRAMS=  foo.oct
> 
> foo_oct_SOURCES= foo.cc
> 
> am i right?
> 
> thanks for any help,
> eric.

Octave-forge is probably a bad example now to look at. When octave-forge
was monolithic, the configure.base file together with others in each of
the directories did a lot more that it currently does. We might even be
able to eliminate the one in the top level directory altogether now,
since its basically only used for a couple of things like the
mkdoc/mktexi scripts, and a couple of bits of package manager code. The
stuff that extracts the compile flags from mkoctfile in the toplevel
configure.base of octave-forge isn't used at the moment, but when
stripping back the code for the package manager from the monolithic
octave-forge, we didn't want to take out too much unintentionally.

The configuration scripts in the packages themselves are perhaps a bit
more interesting as they look for features, like the presence of pcre in
main/strings..

D.