Re: HEADS UP: Impending autotools changes



Note that the below instructions are not strictly accurate (*sigh*)

See http://freebsd.lovett.com/patches/autotools-updating.txt

for the UPDATING entry.

This has been tested on a machine with a full GNOME and KDE environment installed and will become part of ports/UPDATING.

-aDe


On Jul 27, 2007, at 00:45 , Ade Lovett wrote:

Please note that this change will be committed some time this coming weekend.

-aDe


Begin forwarded message:

From: Ade Lovett <ade@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 23, 2007 19:13:21 PDT
To: ports@xxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Ade Lovett <ade@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: HEADS UP: Impending autotools changes

In the next few days, after extensive testing, the next major update to the autotools infrastructure will be committed to the ports tree.

These changes bring FreeBSD's autoconf/automake in line with autotool suites available on other platforms, allowing for multiple versions to be installed and run in isolation of each other:

[ade@foo:/usr/local/bin] 4% ls autoconf* automake*
autoconf autoconf-wrapper automake-1.6
autoconf-2.13 automake automake-1.7
autoconf-2.53 automake-1.10 automake-1.8
autoconf-2.59 automake-1.4 automake-1.9
autoconf-2.61 automake-1.5 automake-wrapper

As you will see from the above, the naming conventions have been changed to be "stock", with unversioned scripts allowing the use of any version of the tools via a couple of wrapper scripts written by des@.

There are 3 key points associated with this change:

1. The ports versions of autoconf* and automake* can now be used, not only for building other ports, but also for developing platform-independent code using this tools -- as such, the gnu-* variants will be disappearing shortly.

2. For IDEs, or development in general, a new port, devel/ autotools (also available in a port Makefile as USE_AUTOTOOLS= autotools:run) will bring in all available versions of the autotools.

3. When it comes to the actual update, a number of ports, most notably IDEs and php{4,5}, but all software that embeds the current names of autotools in build scripts etc. will need to be updated, or bad things will happen. Regretfully, particularly in the case of PHP, this will likely require manual intervention outside of the portupgrade/portmaster update methodologies.

That aside, this is a significant step forward for autotools on FreeBSD, and my thanks go out to those that have provided assistance and testing. In particularly, I would like to thank linimon@, pav@, kris@ and des@ for their respective efforts in making this happen.

-aDe



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