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Autotools cleanup

This work has been initiated by Guillaume Rousse (INRIA), sympa packager for Mandriva. This page should help to coordinate between Guillaume and Sympa developers.

  • the result is not FHS compatible (/home is not a software installation prefix)
  • the configure scripts ignore standard directories switches (–bindir,–datadir, etc…) and duplicates them as non-standard switches instead (–with-bindir, –with-datadir, etc…)
  • the configure scripts ask for variables, such as openssl location, which are absolutly useless for installation itself
  • the 'install' makefile target doesn't support DESTDIR= option during installation
  • the 'install' makefile target is not usable by a normal user, due to the usage of chown/chgrp commands
  • checks are mixed between the './configure' and 'make' steps (perl modules)
  • distributed archive contains generated files (man pages, i86 executables, autoconf cache files, etc…)
  • removal of all targets already defined by automake (install, all, etc..)
  • removal of all recursion targets (makedoc, makeman,…)
  • conversion of all static Makefile in src and doc trees to Makefile.ams
  • definition of SUBDIR variable in top-level, src and doc subdirs in Makefile.am
  • definition of primary targets in those makefile, as foo_BAR variables, where foo is the installation directory, and BAR the type of the file to install
  • definition of EXTRA_DIST and CLEANFILES variable to ensure make clean and make dist will work as expected
  • use a standard in-place substitution system for variables defined by configure process, as per http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/autoconf-2.57/html_mono/autoconf.html#SEC24
  • drop all reference to custom variables in configure.ac for those directories defined in GNU's standards
  • drop non-standard /home/sympa prefix
  • usage of a config.h headers rather than command line flags to pass C symbols for building binaries
  • dev/autotools_cleanup.1213878193.txt.gz
  • Last modified: 2008/06/19 14:23
  • by olivier.salaun@cru.fr