Created attachment 66878 [details] [review]
Patch to pass libdir to the autogen script

> gstreamer ignores --libdir parameters to the common autogen script, this breaks
> jhbuild on 64bit platforms for instance.

You can already pass additional parameters like --libdir to autogen.sh like this:

  $ autogen.sh -- --libdir= 


Our build system maintainer seems to strongly dislike adding this to gst-autogen, see http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=307352 for a previous discussion about this ...

Finally found time to follow up.  Additional parameters are not passed through, they are dropped by gst-autogen.sh:

       --) shift ; break ;;
      *) echo "- ignoring unknown autogen.sh argument $1"; shift ;;

Tne patch in bug 307352 not longer seems to be applied or was never applied to gst 0.10.

*** Bug 397899 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

In multiple places (such as bug 164973 comment 6), Thomas has said something along the lines of:

  all arguments to autogen that are supposed to go to configure should be listed
  AFTER "--".  This is the standard way to separate a program's own options from
  other parameters.

However, gstreamer oddly doesn't require this for --prefix, despite the fact that it is an argument to configure.  --prefix and --libdir have extremely similar meanings: setting up the path for installation.  So why shouldn't these two be treated the same?  I think gstreamer should either not treat --prefix specially (and require it to be listed after "--"), or apply JPR's patch for specially treating --libdir in an identical way to --prefix.  Am I missing something?

P.S.  I'm also filing a bug against jhbuild right now with the patch to make --libdir be passed after --, if both are being passed.  I still think gstreamer needs to fix the inconsistency in handling --prefix and --libdir, though.

I agree that --prefix is inconsistent and I was opposed to adding it.

So yes, let's remove --prefix from autogen.sh, I support Elijah fully in this.

Adding --libdir as well to autogen.sh would only be a good idea if we also add:
  --bindir=DIR           user executables [EPREFIX/bin]
  --sbindir=DIR          system admin executables [EPREFIX/sbin]
  --libexecdir=DIR       program executables [EPREFIX/libexec]
  --datadir=DIR          read-only architecture-independent data [PREFIX/share]
  --sysconfdir=DIR       read-only single-machine data [PREFIX/etc]
  --sharedstatedir=DIR   modifiable architecture-independent data [PREFIX/com]
  --localstatedir=DIR    modifiable single-machine data [PREFIX/var]
  --includedir=DIR       C header files [PREFIX/include]
  --oldincludedir=DIR    C header files for non-gcc [/usr/include]
  --infodir=DIR          info documentation [PREFIX/info]
  --mandir=DIR           man documentation [PREFIX/man]

wrt. the link to the other bug report - I have never understood why jhbuild never made the distinction between autogen and configure.

Surely by now, now that jhbuild has support for tarballs *and* uses it for a whole set of modules, it is doing The Right Thing and separating autogen steps from configure steps ?

I've patch jhbuild to handle passing --prefix after '-- ' in the arguments to autogen (when '-- ' is passed, of course), so feel free to make this change.  The patch isn't committed quite yet, but it has been tested and it is simple so feel free to provide extra motivation to quickly review it.

jhbuild basically has autogen and configure going through the same code paths, but there is an ability to check which of the two is running and add special case code.  In fact, there was already one special case check in jhbuild (to remove --enable-maintainer-mode from tarball builds since it apparently broke them).

Thomas, is it ok to go ahead and fix this in gstreamer now?

Note that the jhbuild patch has been accepted and committed a while ago, so removing the special casing of --prefix won't break jhbuild.

[Updating the bug summary and status as per Thomas' preferred fix.]

 2008-02-25  Andy Wingo  <wingo@pobox.com>

        * gst-autogen.sh: Instead of only passing certain arguments to
        configure, pass anything that we didn't handle. Much friendlier.
        Fixes #34412.