Re: build problems

[Ed]

2008/5/26 John Darrington <address@hidden>:
> Is there any particular reason why you're building from CVS rather
> than from the pre-release tarball on alpha.gnu.org ?

The situation is pretty simple. I thought i'd see if I could
contribute to pspp, and the first step is to pull cvs to make sure
you're looking at the newest code.

> My recollection is that there were two problems.  Editing po/Makevars
> only solved one of them.  Unfortunately I don't remember the exact details.

I didn't remove the existing behaviours, so for everyone it worked for
before, it should still work. And it appears to work fine for me with
the edit to po/Makevars... its surely preferable to not working at all
anyway!

>       The force of my magic is insufficient for this task.
>
>
> This is wrong.  Building from the tarball doesn't require gperf.  It's
> only required when building from a CVS checkout.  Therefore, testing
> for it in configure is incorrect.

Well, quite, hence my comment. Presumably theres some deeper autoconf
magic to test for programs needed to rebuild derived sources, but I
don't know it. In general, autotools is horrible stuff I try to stay
away from.

> My opinion is that inserting patches just to make the code compatible
> with old versions of libraries is a counterproductive process.

I would usually agree with you, however it is also the case that you
can make it too hard for people to get the minimum specs for your
software. There's a clear trade-off there. Requiring libraries that
are too new to have made it into major stable distributions is
problematic.

> Perhaps however we could publish your patches as seperate items for
> people who really want to build against old libraries.  But this is a
> decision for Ben, who is the pspp maintainer.

The only point in sending these patches is that I really don't have
the energy to maintain my own patched source tree against cvs in order
to contribute.

> This is overly complex.  You don't need these conditionals.  Instead of
> #ifndef PSPP_WITH_GTK_2_10_0, you can simply use the GTK_CHECK_VERSION
> macro.  See
> http://library.gnome.org/devel/gtk/stable/gtk-Feature-Test-Macros.html

Thanks for the pointer. In my experience, one can either whine or try
to offer solutions. It is a little frustrating when you appear to get
less credit for trying than you would have for whining.

> Maybe it'll be easier for Ben to make a decision, if you provide each
> point that you've changed in a seperate patch.  You can submit them at
> http://savannah.gnu.org/patch/?group=pspp if that's easier for you.

Not really any point from my perspective, as I outlined above.

Ed