GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 323341
./autogen.sh enchancement for ease of use on FreeBSD
Last modified: 2005-12-07 01:15:32 UTC
In autogen.sh, use symbolic variables like ACLOCAL=aclocal AUTOCONF=autoconf AUTOHEADER=autoheader AUTOMAKE=automake LIBTOOLISE=libtoolize instead of directly calling the executable. It makes it easier for platforms with less-common executable names (such as FreeBSD). You can change everything in one place. This method is fairly common. See patch in attachement.
Created attachment 55668 [details] [review] Patch for autogen.sh
This patch changes the behaviour of autogen.sh and I don't see a reason to do such a change. Actually, I don't see a need for any changes to autogen.sh. It's just a convenience script and people with uncommon environments are free to follow the instructions in HACKING and call the build tools manually. IMO the real fix here is to install proper symlinks on your FreeBSD system. Not going to apply this patch, but I would accept a less intrusive patch that keeps the current behaviour of preferring automake-1.9 and exiting with proper error codes.
You're right. It does change the lookup order for automake executables. I'll attach a cleaner patch which affect fewer lines. It will only introduce the symbolic names idea and will check for user-given executable names after looking at the proposed automake-1.9 name. The main goal is to add the convenience of being able to provide alternative names without being required to manually edit every occurence of that names in autogen.sh. P.S. Normally, the user-given executable names should override anything else. The prefered names should be put in the symbolic name as default.
Created attachment 55691 [details] [review] Better patch In response to comment #2.
2005-12-06 Sven Neumann <sven@gimp.org> * autogen.sh: applied a patch provided by Pierre-Paul Lavoie that makes it easier to adapt autogen.sh to uncommon executable names (bug #323341).
Further tweaks: 2005-12-06 Manish Singh <yosh@gimp.org> * autogen.sh: Allow overriding from shell environment variables, and prefer any overrid automakes to the default, so long as the version is new enough.