Compilation process

[Guyou]

Hi,

Reading the forum, the mailing list and the SVN, it seems that the compilation process has some issues.

Can I suggest you to use auto-tools? They are quite portable (all *nix, mingw+msys...). For developpers, they are easy to learn, and the only more complicated tasks can be done by a specific developper (no lot of work).
For the (end-)user, it is really easy, as the only thing to do is to ./configure with the specific options (if the configure is not able to find them, like sound architecture or graphics for example) and then make ; make install.

I saw that Eddy Cullen started a new Makefile family. I wish to propose my help migrating them to auto-tools. I did this job for some projects yet.
If anybody is interested, please start a "branches/autotools" on the svn and I will start from there.

[Mattn]

you are welcome to do it. would be really cool. but i think trunk would need - or do you expect such big changes,that normal build will fail? otherwise it should not be a problem to do it in trunk

[Guyou]

You are probably right: trunk is possibly the best repos where doing this job. I'm not in use with the coding rules.
With my previous experiences, I hink such job can take 2 or 3 days and solving more specific "bugs" (detected when people test the auto-tooli integration) can take 1 or 2 weeks.
Other point, Eddy seems to start a work around Makefiles and I don't want to conflict with his job.
Last point: I'm not an official ufoai's developer. It will be my first contribution. So I need a "godfather" to test and eventually commit my patches/contributions.

For all these reasons, I thought it could be better to do the job in a branch. But, once again, I'm not in use with the ufoai's coding rules and SVN access.

[Bandobras]

Somebody else did cmake recently and it mostly works. You may want to take a look...

[Guyou]

Somebody else did cmake recently and it mostly works. You may want to take a look...

I know (partially) cmake (a project at office which use ITK). I understand that cmake and auto-tools are quite similar: specific configuration files that produce build environment. The two tools requires specific commands to produce the build environment. auto-tools require m4 and massive .m4 library, cmake requires cmake and its library.

But I don't know how the "configuration" process work for cmake.
With autotools, the configuration is done by the guy who compile (he does "./configure" just before "make").
With cmake, when occurs the configuration?

In my point of view, the configuration step is really important for ufoai. With auto-tools, the end user (more precisely the packager) "only" needs a small posix compliant environment. It will then be possible to develop a script that does the most of the configuration automatically (graphics, sound, libs...).
I don't know what is possible with cmake and if cmake must be installed on the end user desktop.

[tomshackell]

Hi Guyou,


Amuzingly autoconf support was added yesterday. I just did the makefiles by hand though since they aren't too bad.

http://ufo.myexp.de/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=628

Thanks :-)


Tom