Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2007 19:13:21 -0700 From: Ade Lovett <ade@FreeBSD.org> To: ports@FreeBSD.org Cc: Ade Lovett <ade@FreeBSD.org> Subject: HEADS UP: Impending autotools changes Message-ID: <ED6C9CE7-9085-4FA8-BDC5-9B526C196DF5@FreeBSD.org>
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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
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