According to autoconf manual (about AC_PROG_CC): If using the GNU C compiler, set shell variable GCC to ‘yes’. If output variable CFLAGS was not already set, set it to -g -O2 for the GNU C compiler (-O2 on systems where GCC does not accept -g), or -g for other compilers. If your package does not … Read more
Incredibly, somehow everyone else missed the canonical way to do this, which has been around since 2 years before this thread began. 🙂 I wondered the same thing as the OP and was disappointed by the lack of proper (non-ugly) ways to do this when I read this thread. A few days later, while idly … Read more
One significant problem with PKG_CHECK_MODULES is that it causes failures where it should not. If a user installs libfoo in /p/a/t/h and invokes a configure script with LDFLAGS=-L/p/a/t/h, the user is justified in expecting the configury to find libfoo. But, the user also must set PKG_CONFIG_PATH so that the configure script can find foo.pc in … Read more
configure.ac and configure.in are two possible names for the master Autoconf source file, which is processed by autoconf to generate the configure shell script. configure.ac is preferred for new packages, configure.in is an older name which still works. (The .in suffix is now recommended to be used only for files which will be processed by … Read more
You typically need to use glibtool and glibtoolize, since libtool already exists on OS X as a binary tool for creating Mach-O dynamic libraries. So, that’s how MacPorts installs it, using a program name transform, though the port itself is still named ‘libtool’. Some autogen.sh scripts (or their equivalent) will honor the LIBTOOL / LIBTOOLIZE … Read more
You almost have it right; why did you add the semicolon? To do it on the configure line: ./configure CFLAGS=’-g -O2 -w’ CXXFLAGS=’-g -O2 -w’ To do it on the make line: make CFLAGS=’-g -O2 -w’ CXXFLAGS=’-g -O2 -w’ However, that doesn’t really remove consider all warnings as errors; that removes all warnings. So specifying … Read more
In configure.ac, lines commented with ‘#’ that occur after AC_INIT will appear in the resulting configure script. dnl comments will not. One purpose of dnl is to discard unwanted newlines in an effort to make the configure script readable. Also, it is appropriate to use dnl comments to document an m4 macro; those comments make … Read more
In order to really understand the autotools utilities you have to remember where they come from: they come from an open source world where there are (a) developers who are working from a source code repository (CVS, Git, etc.) and creating a tar file or similar containing source code and putting that tar file up … Read more
I’m taking the chance of being downvoted but, I must admit, that unfortunately there is no real substitute for autotools. CMake, SCons, bjam are nice but, when it comes to serious work… it is quite clear that autotools are superior, not because CMake can’t do the same thing, but because it is just much harder … Read more
ismail’s solution is a common approach, but it suffers from some serious problems. If the user tries to get a debug build by doing ‘./configure –enable-debug’, the configure script will set CFLAGS to ‘-g -O2’ and the Makefile will use ‘-g3 -O0 … -g -O2’ when building any executables. In that case, gcc will use … Read more