Hi Laura,
* laura la wrote on Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 04:35:53PM CET:
first of all, It took me 4 google searches to find this FAQ you
mention, is this it?
http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/FAQ.html
Yes.
About that automake faq, let me tell you from my point of view, and
maybe it will help others in my situation: the
new-opensource-contributor-that-is-just-starting. This is what I have
in my head, this is all my knowledge when bumping into problems: Here
I admit with brutal honesty my complete ignorance up to this point.
Hey, your email touches a lot of good points, and I would like to thank
you for that. Many people on these lists have been using these tools
for a long time, and I guess I can only apologize for becoming blind to
some of the issues that new users are faced with, when not hearing about
them. So, in a way, your help would be ideal for us (if you could spare
the time, of course)!
The Automake manual contains an introduction to the autotools overall:
http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/Autotools-Introduction.html
I understand you're really short on time, and have got a lot to take in.
Still, I'd like to ask you to at least skim the chapter for a basic
understanding. (The Introduction chapter is a short version of
Alexandre's great tutorial which Stefano points you to.)
To get up to speed with an existing project quickly, you need to perform
some basic tasks. Maybe it would help if we collected a set of those
tasks and explained them, say, in a extra section in the Introduction
chapter.
For that, it would be great to hear as much as possible from you about
things you don't understand, that are hurdles. I find some in the rest
of your mail already (but it will take me some time to write good
documentation for that):
- what does ./autogen.sh or ./bootstrap do?
- which files are are hand-written, which are generated (and how)?
- how can I install below my $HOME, without sudo?
- how do I add a new library dependency or compiler/linker flags to the
build system?
- what is this PKG_CONFIG_PATH thingy, and why do I need to set it?
- what does 'test X$variable = x' mean?
- what are variables like INTL_CFLAGS or INTL_LIBS for?
Then, we should reorganize the text and point to it so it can be found
better.