Re: nautilus build sucks.

[Mathieu Lacage <lacage email enst fr>]

Elliot Lee <sopwith@redhat.com> writes:

> 
> On 5 Jun 2000, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> > I rather see a document describing how to kill the AM macros, which
> > are nothing but a total pain in the ass from any point of view you
> > look at them.
> > 
> > We should be able to do everything the AM macros do with gnome-config
> > testing.  Sure, not as nice as typing "AM_CHECK_GNOME", but a lot more
> > reliable, useful, and wont cause headaches that we have had since we
> > began using our own macros in GNOME.
> 
> The macros are sometimes a headache, but I don't think it is worth it
> enough to remove the features provided to the end user.
> 
> If people want to use gnome-config directly from configure.in, that should
> work fine, but the problem is that most of the time people's direct usage
> from configure.in lacks all the sanity checks and flexibility that is
> built into the macros.

Completely agreed.

Although, a recnt discussion on gnome-components launched a similar 
problem to the one I am trying to solve: in bonobo, we have the .oafinfo
files which are supposed to be installed in $(datadir)/oaf.
The problem is that you want OAF to be able to fetch all the OAF files
all by itself. Maciej did some kind of self-solution which makes use of 
the OAFINFO_PATH. To quote him: 

> OAFINFO_PATH is necessary anyway. Third-party applications are
> supposed to be installed in a directory of their own under
> /opt. Installing some random files in a partitioned filespace under
> /usr is not an option. Basically only things that come with your
> distribution are supposed to go under /usr/share/oaf.


The idea is that we already have GNOME_PATH which should be used by 
all the packages which install themselves. GNOME_PATH is supposed
to contain the list of the prefixes of each gnome package.
Here, I have: GNOME_PATH=/usr:/opt/gnome.
The above ensures that the gnome-config script will do the proper
chechking when it seeks the params for cflags or something and it 
should probably be used by OAF to detect the .oafinfo files.
(probably a matter of a small hack I guess, maciej)

The IDL file problem should be solved in a similar way: 
everytime you install some GNOME stuff in a new prefix, you add it
in GNOME_PATH and the --idl switch (to be written ;) of gnome-config
will return the proper include path for orbit-idl.
The above requires us to add a new field to the blahConf.sh scripts:
IDL_INCLUDE.I can provide patches for the libs which require this.

any comments ? 

maciej, are you okay to do the change in OAF ? 

I will post a patch to gnome-config asap.

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Lacage, mathieu@gnome.org
212 rue de tolbiac, 75013 Paris, FRANCE
http://www.advogato.org/person/mathieu