Don’t indent the comment — when the line starts with a tab, it is a command that is executed by the shell (and the shell treats the comment as a comment). Proof of concept (ss.mk): all: echo “This is the first command” # This comment is echoed # This comment is not echoed echo “This … Read more
You should not keep any files under version control that are not hand-edited. That means any generated file should be ignored by the version control system. I basically put only the following under version control: configure.ac Makefile.am the documentation files such as AUTHORS, NEWS etc. Makefile.am in subdirectories To address the point of having a … Read more
Passing the following argument to configure script allowed me to build the 32bit library on 64bit Linux ./configure –build=i686-pc-linux-gnu CFLAGS=-m32 CXXFLAGS=-m32 LDFLAGS=-m32
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
You are talking about two separate but intertwined things here: Autotools GNU coding standards Within Autotools, you have several projects: Autoconf Automake Libtool Let’s look at each one individually. Autoconf Autoconf easily scans an existing tree to find its dependencies and create a configure script that will run under almost any kind of shell. The … Read more
There is no automated tool that will convert an arbitrary build system from autotools to cmake. I have converted a few moderately large projects manually. I like to create one CMakeLists.txt file for each set of configure.ac and/or Makefile.am file, to ease the conversion from autotools to cmake. Sadly, this manual approach requires developing an … Read more
Try running autoreconf –force –install ./configure make in the root directory of your project. If that doesn’t work, try running make maintainer-clean first and then go to step 1. If that still doesn’t work, run make maintainer-clean, then delete every generated file in the root directory of your project; including aclocal.m4, any m4 directory, any … 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
If you’re using a shell that does simple substitution and the SHELL_VAR variable does not exist (or is blank), then you need to watch out for the edge cases. The following translations will happen: if test $SHELL_VAR = yes; then –> if test = yes; then if test x$SHELL_VAR = xyes; then –> if test … Read more
After a fair amount of work, I was able to get it to build on Ubuntu 12.04 x86 and Debian 7.4 x86_64. I wrote up a guide below. Can you please try following it to see if it resolves the issue? If not please let me know where you get stuck. Install Common Dependencies sudo … Read more