From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Jul 24 02:53:05 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: ports@FreeBSD.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3740D16A418 for ; Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:53:05 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from ade@lovett.com) Received: from mail.lovett.com (foo.lovett.com [67.134.38.158]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 19F6513C459 for ; Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:53:05 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from ade@lovett.com) Received: from inferno.canal.lovett.com ([172.16.32.23]:62155) by mail.lovett.com with esmtpsa (TLSv1:AES128-SHA:128) (Exim 4.67 (FreeBSD)) (envelope-from ) id 1ID9tq-000JxB-Ov; Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:13:22 -0700 Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v752.3) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed Message-Id: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ade Lovett Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:13:21 -0700 To: ports@FreeBSD.org X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3) Sender: ade@lovett.com Cc: Ade Lovett Subject: HEADS UP: Impending autotools changes X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2007 02:53:05 -0000 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@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@. 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