On Thu, May 31, 2012 at 5:21 AM, Andrew Benton <a...@benton.eu.com> wrote: > On Thu, 31 May 2012 00:58:08 +0100 > Ken Moffat <zarniwh...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > >> Actually, for some of us they *are* scary. I thought I was making >> some progress (persuaded autoreconf to complete without errors using >> the attached -A.patch), but then configure went into an infinite >> loop spewing out '=no' lines. That's around the check to see if we >> only want udev. But after the test for whether to build static >> libraries > > I also got the same result from trying to make Dan's patch work, just > after checking whether to build the static libraries it started spewing > out '=no' lines. If I redirected it to a file (to try and see the > start) the file quickly grew to be enormous. To me, the problem with > autofoo isn't that it's scary it's just that it's obscure and difficult > to follow. I agree that the autofoo approach is the one most likely to > be accepted upstream but Bruce's more direct approach seems to be > paying dividends in the short term.
Here's an update. I forgot that [] are quotes in autoconf, so you usually end up using test instead. I still didn't test it works all the way, but I think configure should run. Allow me to get on my soapbox here for a minute. Nearly all the energy in LFS is used on building packages and all the associated issues with bootstrapping systems. Ask yourself, what percentage of the packages you're building use the autotools? 50%? 75%? 90%? The percentage is high regardless. IMO, if what you're interested in is building packages, then learning the process the build is created would be a great investment. I see so much time spent here trying to work around build issues and basically guessing at how the build works. I almost never see someone actually diagnose the issue at the root when the autotools are involved. The autotools are unusual, but they really aren't that complex. One of my real "oh" moments when I was still building LFS was when I saw an analysis Greg did of a configure bug and realized that it really wasn't that complex at all. At Xorg a guy showed up and wanted to help on build issues but had never seen the autotools before. Within a few months he was squashing bugs all over the place and now he's basically the expert there. It's a really handy skill set because of the ubiquity of the autotools. The documentation is very good: http://www.gnu.org/software/autoconf/manual/ http://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/ http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/manual/ Old, but will teach you the basics: http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/ I will now return to lurking. -- Dan
udev-only.patch
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