automake-1.5

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

I put together a few notes for people trying to compile gnome with
automake 1.5, which is available from:
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.5.tar.gz

These are based mainly on experience using the devel releases I have been
using for a while.

If you try to compile development gtk+ with the new automake, it will fail
when it gets up to the asm files in gdk-pixbuf.  To fix this problem, add
the following line to configure.in:
  AM_PROG_AS
This will define AS and ASFLAGS to their appropriate values.  This would
also required to compile stable gdk-pixbuf.

A number of gnome modules include a line like the following in their
configure.in:
  AM_CONDITIONAL(FALSE, test "x" = "y")
This line should just be removed outright.  Automake 1.5's AM_CONDITIONAL
macro will cause autoconf to bomb out if you define a conditional by the
name TRUE or FALSE.  Automake 1.5 should handle these conditional names
internally with the expected results.

Some packages will fail on make distcheck with automake 1.5.  There are
two culprits here.

One is that it now makes the source directory for the test build read
only during the build.  You can get round this by not putting generated
files in the source dir during build or dist (is a bit of a problem for
docs), or put in an explicit "chmod u+w $(sourcedir)" in your rules (which
is cheating).

The other possible cause is that automake 1.5's distcheck rule will bomb
out if "make uninstall" doesn't remove all the files installed by "make
install".  This can be fixed with the appropriate uninstall-local targets
in your makefiles.

Distcheck will also bomb out if the "make distclean" target leaves
generated files in the build directory.  This can be fixed by adding
distclean-local targets to your makefiles.

On the bright side, 1.5 adds support for automatic dependency tracking
without GNU make/gcc, handling of python source files (complete with byte
compilation on install), compiling java to native code with GCJ, and many
other fixes.

James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/