Fwd: HEADS UP: Impending autotools changes

[Ade Lovett]

Please note that this change will be committed some time this coming  
weekend.

-aDe


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Ade Lovett <ade at FreeBSD.org>
> Date: July 23, 2007 19:13:21  PDT
> To: ports at FreeBSD.org
> Cc: Ade Lovett <ade at FreeBSD.org>
> Subject: HEADS UP: Impending autotools changes
>
> In the next few days, after extensive testing, the next major  
> update to the autotools infrastructure will be committed to the  
> ports tree.
>
> These changes bring FreeBSD's autoconf/automake in line with  
> autotool suites available on other platforms, allowing for multiple  
> versions to be installed and run in isolation of each other:
>
> [ade at foo:/usr/local/bin] 4% ls autoconf* automake*
> autoconf               autoconf-wrapper       automake-1.6
> autoconf-2.13          automake               automake-1.7
> autoconf-2.53          automake-1.10          automake-1.8
> autoconf-2.59          automake-1.4           automake-1.9
> autoconf-2.61          automake-1.5           automake-wrapper
>
> As you will see from the above, the naming conventions have been  
> changed to be "stock", with unversioned scripts allowing the use of  
> any version of the tools via a couple of wrapper scripts written by  
> des at .
>
> There are 3 key points associated with this change:
>
> 1.  The ports versions of autoconf* and automake* can now be used,  
> not only for building other ports, but also for developing platform- 
> independent code using this tools -- as such, the gnu-* variants  
> will be disappearing shortly.
>
> 2.  For IDEs, or development in general, a new port, devel/ 
> autotools (also available in a port Makefile as USE_AUTOTOOLS=  
> autotools:run) will bring in all available versions of the autotools.
>
> 3.  When it comes to the actual update, a number of ports, most  
> notably IDEs and php{4,5}, but all software that embeds the current  
> names of autotools in build scripts etc. will need to be updated,  
> or bad things will happen.  Regretfully, particularly in the case  
> of PHP, this will likely require manual intervention outside of the  
> portupgrade/portmaster update methodologies.
>
> That aside, this is a significant step forward for autotools on  
> FreeBSD, and my thanks go out to those that have provided  
> assistance and testing.  In particularly, I would like to thank  
> linimon@, pav@, kris@ and des@ for their respective efforts in  
> making this happen.
>
> -aDe
>
>