Re: [Libxmlplusplus-general] autogen.sh without configure?

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-02-04 at 08:21, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>
>
> > Oh, and can we take out the call to './configure' from the autogen.sh script ?
> > I'd like to be able to configure (and build) in a separate build tree, which
> > currently isn't possible.
>
>
> Why isn't this possible now? Isn't it just an extra configure option?
> autogen.sh passes extra options to configure.

to build libxml++ from a fresh cvs checkout, you have to do the
following:

1) check out from cvs
2) run all the autotools to generate the configure script, as well as
   Makefile.in and config.h.in templates.

3) run configure to prepare the build
4) make


It is important to note that a source release (or snapshot) is done
after step 2, so users don't need the autotools.
Further, it is important to note that starting from step 3, the source
tree can be considered read-only:

1> cvs -d ... co libxml++

2.1> cd libxml++
2.2> ./autogen.sh
2.3> cd ..

3.1> mkdir libxml++build
3.2> cd libxml++build
3.3> ../libxml++/configure

4> make

note how I call configure: the script knows the cwd (the 'build dir', as
well as the directory it lives in (the 'src dir'), and thus can create
the build tree with all the necessary infrastructure (relative paths).
Doing this allows you to have multiple builds in sync with the same sources.

This is important when you want to try out multiple configurations, such
as build with different compilers, compiler options, etc., and test 
source changes with all of them before checking them in.

This scheme is applied successfully by a lot of projects, and it is
sometimes vital. It is less vital to libxml++, but given that the 
suggested change affects one line, I thought it would be worth it.
(and yes, I tried it and it works perfectly fine)

Stefan