Re: gnome-autogen.sh and autogen.sh

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

Hi Michael,

> > So my question is : would a patch to autogen.sh in gnome-common to do that 
> > be accepted ?  Or are there good reasons why this isn't done at the moment 
> 
> 	It sound good to me; that is if we can reliably distinguish what is an
> error from a warning.

Well, I've always used the return value, and it never caused any problems.  
We do it in GStreamer too.  If it's just a warning, the autotools still 
return 0, if it's not, they exit with an error value.

Warnings would be stuff like m4_patsubst complaining for some very unknown 
reason.  They wouldn't make the autotools stop.
Errors would be "hey, acinclude isn't finding that funky macro you're 
trying to use in configure.in", and are very much fatal later on.
So I think in practice it works really well.  I haven't had any people 
tell us in GStreamer that autogen.sh failed with an error that was 
recoverable.

(maybe that doesn't say much, people generally don't know why autogen.sh 
is failing ;)


> 	Another thing that would be _extremely_ useful to do IMHO, would be to
> ensure that if 'gnome-config --cflags gtk' doesn't have the parallel
> installed include path, then we abort nicely telling people to update
> their glib/gtk+ V 1.2 since the old version is going to screw with their
> build. That's prolly the most common problem I've seen. [ we could do a
> quick approximation of that by poking ${prefix}/include/gtk to see if it
> exists.

Well, we can't check prefix since autogen.sh typically doesn't know about 
it (unles gnome-autogen.sh also passes on some flags to configure, does it 
do that currently ?), but we can check the output and grep for 
include/gtk-1.2 and include/glib-1.2, so yes, this is doable.  Want me to 
do that ?

> 	Then again, I've no idea who would approve your patch to gnome-common.

Heh.  I guess the REAL question is : do we have an idea who would 
disapprove to my commit to gnome-common ?

Thomas

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