[MonoDevelop] AutoTools

[Matze Braun]

Am Donnerstag, den 23.03.2006, 16:46 -0500 schrieb Scott Ellington:
> Hi,
> 
> Let me go ahead and summarize what my ideas are for this Addin and then
> mention a few issues I already foresee:
> 
> This addin will take the configuration details for a given solution and
> it's child solutions and projects, and create a complete AutoTools setup
> for it.  This will allow developers to follow Mono's deployment
> guidelines
> ( http://www.mono-project.com/Guidelines:Application_Deployment )
> without having to get their hands dirty in the pain that is autotools.
> 
> Lluis and others have other goals for AutoTools integration.  It would
> be better for them to describe those.
> 
> Here are couple of issue that have already sprung to mind (Note: my
> Autotools knowledge is not limitless, so please correct me if I am
> mistaken in any way):
> 
> 1) autotools works in a hierarchical manner.  That is, everything is
> under one directory, often organized into subdirectories.  Yet MD can
> link to projects/solutions in different directories and so forth.  I
> don't know exactly how to reconcile this.
Cycles are not allowed in project references. So you should be able to
sort the projects into an order that satisfies project dependencies.
This might get a bit hairy if you need an order like
	dir1/project1_1 dir2/project2_1 dir1/project1_2 dir2/project2_2
as then you can't place Makefile.ams into the src/ and lib/
subdirectories and descent from there. But as such cases are rare in
practice, you could consider to either give a warning. Or simply fix it
by only placing Makefile.ams into the project subdirectories and
mentioning them all directly in the toplevel Makefile.am. In my example:
	SUBDIRS = dir1/project1_1 dir2/project2_1 dir1/project1_2
dir2/project2_2


> 2) MD stores reference to things like gtk# as GAC references.  Yet we
> would probably want to be testing for the gtk-sharp-2.0 pkg-config
> module.  How do we go about this?  Do we need another reference type?

In my opinion the versioning scheme of the gac is superior to this
pkg-config stuff. It shouldn't be too hard to write some autoconf macros
that check for the precence and paths of GAC libraries and use these. I
can try hacking some .m4 macros for you if you want.

Greetings,
	Matze