Re: [Anjuta-devel] Re: [Anjuta-list] Newbie Question: Checking for Libs

[Naba Kumar <kh_naba gmx net>]

On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 10:39, Biswapesh Chattopadhyay wrote:
> This is a pretty good question and I'm afraid the answer is: we do a
> pretty shitty job of making the user's autotools handling pain easier.
> This is mainly due to two reasons:
> 
> 1) Limitations of our project manager. It does not understand
> hierarchies, cannot parse configure.in/Makefile.am, etc., cannot handle
> multiple targets, etc. We are hoping to correct this in Anjuta2 and in a
> future GNOME2 port of Anjuta1.
> 
> 2) There is no standard way to check for a particular library, header
> file, etc. The GNOME (and KDE I think) teams are trying to standardize
> on pkg-config but currently, there are various ways to check for package
> installation. The main ways are:
> 
  3) autotools were designed mainly for hand-coding and is not machine
friendly. With that respect, cons system (I haven't tried it though),
which uses xml, is far more machine friendly. Unfortunately, cons is not
a viable option to depend on for an IDE to manage a project, because
most of the projects use autotools.

The idea is to come up with an xxl/xslt framework that will sit on top
of autotools/cons systems. The upper GUI will simply interact with this
framwork. Then during project builds, the framework can simply generate
the right build files and proceed with the build/compile/whatever.

So basically, any 'foobar' management system just have to do is have the
right xsl file for conversion.

-- 
Regards,
-Naba