[xmlroff] Autotools wizardry [Was: How you can help]

[Tony Graham]

On Wed, Apr 25 2007 16:00:22 +0100, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
> -On [20070425 16:29], Tony Graham (Tony.Graham at MenteithConsulting.com) wrote:
>>I have added a "Getting Involved with xmlroff" page to the Trac at:
>>
>>   http://xmlroff.org/wiki/GettingInvolved
>
> What specifically are you looking for with the 'autotools wizardry'?

Nothing specific right now, though I'm sure there's plenty that an
Autotools wizard could find to be infelicitous in the current
configure.ac, etc., in the various xmlroff modules.

I could have done with help most recently when getting xmlroff to
configure PangoXSL and then use its .pc file, but I believe that works
okay now and I'm working on doing without PangoXSL (at least for a
while) anyway.

If I stop to think about current weaknesses in the Autotools use, I
can identify:

 - Inconsistent use of pkg-config.

   AFAIK, there's one use of PKG_CHECK_MODULES, though the macro
   probably didn't exist when most of the configure files were
   written.

 - The way different libraries and programs are checked for in
   configure scripts mostly reflect the examples specific to that
   library or program that I could find at the time.  No doubt they
   could be regularised (and probably simplified by using
   PKG_CHECK_MODULES).

 - There's probably a lot of C files that include Pango, Cairo, and
   GnomePrint libraries on the gcc command line when they don't really
   have to.

   The source code used to be even more liberally sprinkled with
   references to Pango, etc., functions, but for most of the sourrce
   code, it's probably now unnecessary to have to tell gcc where to
   find Pango.  However, I've never put any effort into partitioning
   the compilation into those files that require Pango, etc., and
   those that don't.

 - Is the current uses of noinst_LTLIBRARIES the best arrangement?

 - The xmlroff/docs/Makefile.am is probably out of date w.r.t. current
   practice, but that's probably more an issue for a gtk-doc wizard.

 - The use of configure parameters in the 'testing' module is probably
   not in the spirit of configure usage with the way that you can
   specify xmlroff parameters as "--with-xxx=yyyy".

   I missed a "=" when running 'configure' recently and spent a while
   with the test results being written to a file called "yes".  (see
   http://xmlroff.org/browser/trunk/testing/configure.ac#L164)

 - I would like to do without hardcoding the xmlroff version in
   xmlroff/Makefile.am, e.g.:

      lib_LTLIBRARIES = libfo-0.5.la

   (see http://xmlroff.org/browser/trunk/xmlroff/Makefile.am#L36)

 - It would be good if there was a stylesheet that used the 'testing'
   module's 'testsuites.xml' file (in the manner of 'test2sh.xsl') and
   produced the file of Makefile rules so that, say, modifying a
   test's .fo file in the 'testuite' module meant that only that test
   would be re-run if you ran 'make' in the 'testing' directory.

Did I say the was nothing specific?  Maybe I was wrong.

Regards,


Tony.