moin Claude,

On 2007-11-29 20:10:19, Claude Heiland-Allen claudiusmaximus@goto10.org appears to have written:

So, is there a set of macros I can drop into my acinclude.m4 that provide a nice auto-n00b-friendly environment as a base for creating a configure.ac and a Makefile.am for a Pd external that requires some libraries?

I don't think so. I ask occasionally on the list if there are any m4 programmers lurking about to help setting up something like you describe, but so far no one has bitten, and I haven't got around to learning m4 myself yet.

I've been trying to use autotools (autoconf and friends) to build pdlua, but have ended up in a world of pain and deleted my experiments out of frustration. I tried to understand the system used in CVS/externals/moocow/, but the wizardry was somewhat beyond me. Even more so with the Gem system.

I can't speak for gem's build system, but the autotools conventions in externals/moocow/* are most definitely to be considered *hacks* (rather than "wizardry" ;-) ... for example in 'readdir':

configure.ac or configure.in: + the stuff under "how to hack automake EXEEXT conventions" says it all: automake-1.4 handles the $(EXEEXT) make variable differently than automake-1.9, but I'm not sure when exactly the change occurred. The big idea is that pd externals are built with automake "_PROGRAMS" targets, but they also need to be installed with a ".pd_whatever" extension. So I use EXEEXT to tell automake what that extension is

+ the lines:

...

PD_OBJECT_EXTERNALS="readdir${buildext}" AC_SUBST(PD_OBJECT_EXTERNALS)

just substitute @PD_OBJECT_EXTERNALS@ into Makefile from Makefile.am. You don't need it or anything like it if you know what all your sources and targets are: I sometimes use PD_OBJECT_EXTERNALS to differentiate between library and single-object builds (e.g. in pdstring/).

+ the directory arguments & checks should be self explanatory

+ the stuff under "machine-dependent flags" is borrowed (mostly) from pd's own configure.in, and can probably be left untouched.

config/ subdir: + I put autotools-specific stuff here, to avoid cluttering up other distribution root or source directories

src/ subdir: + The guts: set EXEEXT and build externals as pdexterns_PROGRAMS targets (which is valid since configure.ac did AC_SUBST(pdexternsdir)). + pd-style compiler flags are gathered into AM_CPPFLAGS, AM_CFLAGS, and readdir_LDFLAGS (if you have other libraries to link to, put them in myprog_LDADD, e.g. "readdir_LDADD = -lfoo -lbar").

... in general, there's probably a lot of junk hanging around in the various files that you don't need, but (probably) won't hurt ;-) Certainly ignore and/or delete any rules about $(PODS), unless you're generating README files out of README.pod in perl's pod format.

If you have specific difficulties and/or questions about my autotools hacks, don't hesitate to ask -- I freely admit that they're ugly and cryptic, but they're actually quite adaptable...

marmosets, Bryan