Re: More an autopackage

[David Lee]

On 23 Jan 2001, Tom Tromey wrote:

> [...]
> This is an attractive idea, but it doesn't work if you also want to
> extract the post/pre-install/uninstall commands automatically.  And
> you definitely do want to do this because sometimes these are hairy
> scripts generated by automake itself.
> 
> One approach, which ought to work, would be to use the install-sh hack
> and then scan each generated Makefile looking for the magic *_INSTALL
> variable instance.  Then you could have a small script to extract
> these fragments automatically.  This is a bit ugly, but it ought to
> work ok, at least with automake-generated Makefiles (the only ones I
> care about :-).

Although I helped get this discussion started, I confess to not having
followed every twist and turn.  And although I have done a fair amount of
work with autoconf, I am a complete novice at automake and libtool.  So I
may well be misunderstanding something in what follows...

There would seem to be another issue that we need to consider, which I
don't think we have yet covered (although please correct me if wrong). 
That is the libtool interaction. 

For a non-libtool package, "make install" basically just copies its known
list of files into the final place.  So one can easily envisage a "make
pkg", which simply does different things with this known list of files to
produce the packages. 

But doing "make install" from a package which uses libtool introduces a
level of indirection with its actions of the form:

    /bin/sh ./libtool install ...

The Makefile no longer knows what files are involved, so cannot directly
produce the list of files.  As I see it, "libtool" would need some extra
functionality to be able to produce information (whether filenames or
shell script fragments) for the Makefile to be able to use to produce the
package. 

Or have I misunderstood something?

It is beginning to seem that "autopkg" will require some very close
cooperation, not only with automake, but also with libtool.  So perhaps
having "autopkg" separate from both automake and libtool may itself cause
problems.  Perhaps it might be better if this functionality were to be
incoporated into automake itself, along with some hooks in libtool. 

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