[Rpm-maint] [draft] spec file unification: autotools based projects

[Marc Haisenko]

On Friday 18 July 2008, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> Marc Haisenko wrote:
> > What about passing autoconf cache variables ? I regularly need to do
> > things like:
> >
> > ac_cv_foo=yes \
> > ac_cv_bar=no \
> > ./configure ...
>
> It should not appear in the spec files, as it is not packages specific,
> but platform specific.

Consider you are creating spec files with cross-compiled programs. There you 
NEED to do these things as a lot of autoconf tests want to compile and run a 
program which is obviously not possible if you compile for a different 
architecture. In these cases you need to pass the results via cache 
variables.

> Hopefully autotools provide a support for system-wide caches and
> settings.
>
> You could create a global cache of these variables (for example
> OpenEmbedded does). You can modify definition of %configure or define
> extra variables in your global RPM macros to build it with this cache,
> or do some config.site magic.

And how is that supposed to work ? I would need a way for each spec to tell 
RPM "I'm now compiling for environment X, grab me the appropiate %configure". 
I'm cross-compiling to several different architectures, if I were to only 
cross-compile to one then your suggestions would make sense to me.

> Regarding the cross compilation, autotools have much more problems than
> rpmbuild, so we are still very far from the situation, when unpatched
> standard spec files could be usable for cross compilation.

I don't think this will ever be possible :-) And I don't think that this 
should be a goal. I just wanted to remind that there ARE situations in which 
you need to pass cache variables to autoconf and I don't want to "export" 
them when I need them only for one command (configure).

Marc


-- 
Marc Haisenko

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