Chris Melville wrote:
>
> > I'm sure that's the case. It sounds like the Mozilla build system isn't
> > autoconf/automake based, so all bets are off at that point, and that's
>
> I think there's a sub-project somewhere to "make it so". I'd like to know
> more about autoconf/make - can you suggest a URL?
>
I can suggest *several* URLS!:
GNU "Autotools" "ebook":
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook_toc.html
GNU Manuals Online (http://www.fsf.org/manual/manual.html), in
particular:
http://www.fsf.org/manual/autoconf-2.13/autoconf.html
http://www.fsf.org/manual/automake-1.4/automake.html
Now unfortunately, the docs follow the standard Unix convention that you
have to be an expert before you can be a beginner. The bottom line
though is that you write a "configure.in" and a "makefile.am", and
automake and autoconf take care of the rest, generating a "configure"
script for you. And yes, autoconf and automake really should be a
single tool (and slowly seem to be growing together), but for now you
end up having to run three separate ones in succession (no real biggie -
"aclocal; automake -a; autoconf" generates your "configure" script from
the aforementioned files).
> > anybody these days, and that gets you all GNU build tools, giving you a
> > very powerful common base to start from. And you can cross-compile
> > relatively painlessly to boot.
>
> Agreed! If I was having a small grumble, it was just because I had to
> reorganise a hard drive to install something quite big that I had no other
> need for (other than compiling Mozilla). Never mind, done now.
>
If you do other software work, you'll end up using it for much more than
just Mozilla. Hell, I'd say it's worth it just for wget! I was a
skeptic at first myself, but I find Cygwin absolutely indispensable.
