11. Auto-confisication and Friends
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Once upon a time, Freecell Solver was distributed only with a makefile
for GNU make, and everyone were happy.
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When Stephan Kulow embedded its code into kpat, he adapted the makefile
to use the standard KDE Autoconf-based build process.
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Somewhat afterwards, I decided that I want the build process to be more
portable and modular, and to give users the ability to build a shared
library.
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The solution - converting to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool.
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How to do that exactly is out of the scope of this lecture. I can just say
that it is not very straightforward, and that it required a lot of tweaking
and trial and error.
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I then decided that having an RPM of Freecell Solver would be nice. So I created
an RPM spec for it.
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Again, it required quite a lot of tweaking and experimenting.
(Tzafrir Cohen's Lecture
and various web-resources were a great help)
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I eventually integrated generating an up-to-date RPM SPEC into the Autoconf
process, and thus, was able to build an RPM by issuing a constant sequence of
commands.
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A corresponding Debian package has been initially created by Yotam Rubin and
is now maintained by Risko Gergely, who also uploads it to the Debian pool
of packages.
Written by Shlomi Fish