September 21st, 2009 by
Daniel Elstner
Just a quick note about a little-used feature of GNU Autoconf: site defaults.
Until recently, I used to have a long list of assignments to module_autogenargs['...'] in my ~/.jhbuildrc file to set up default configure options for various modules. This became unwieldy and there was always one module I forgot.
Autoconf comes to the rescue with its support for site defaults. For illustration, here is my ${prefix}/etc/config.site file:
# Autoconf site defaults
test -n "$enable_silent_rules" || enable_silent_rules=yes
test -n "$enable_static" || enable_static=no
test -n "$enable_warnings" || enable_warnings=fatal
The effect is as if I had passed --enable-silent-rules --disable-static --enable-warnings=fatal to every module’s ./autogen.sh, except that I don’t get any annoying warnings if a module doesn’t actually support a particular option. The test conditionals ensure that command-line arguments have precedence over the default values in the config.site file.
Read the manual for the gory details, if you want to. Otherwise, enjoy!
September 17th, 2009 by
Daniel Elstner
After more than a month of infrastructure work, most of the GNOME C++ binding documentation has now been migrated to the GNOME Documentation Library. This includes the Programming with gtkmm guide and the Doxygen API reference documentation of the core C++ binding modules. Compared to the old documentation hosted on the gtkmm website, we’ve now got a bigger pipe, more bling, and less work for us!
All this would not have been possible without the help of Frédéric Péters, who did the actual integration work in the library-web module and has been very responsive to our numerous questions and tweak requests.
Leading up to the migration, the build infrastructure of the GNOME C++ bindings was completely restructured. All the copy’n'paste of build files had degenerated into an unmaintainable mess. When it became clear that we lacked the infrastructure to properly support cross-references from one documentation module to another, I began to cook up something new to replace the mess. The result of this work is the new mm-common module, which provides the shared build support files for the C++ binding modules. As a novelty, it even comes with documentation!
It is quite a bit of work to convert an existing module to use mm-common, and the transition took more time than I had expected. Despite that, the feedback was very positive, and a number of module maintainers started to convert their modules to mm-common on their own. Many thanks to David King, Fabien Parent, Jonathon Jongsma, José Alburquerque, Krzesimir Nowak and Murray Cumming for your work and feedback!
