[Asterisk-Dev] asterisk on non-linux OSes

[Jake Morrison]

On Wednesday 27 August 2003 20:19, timecop at pbx.mine.nu wrote:
> > > I would be happy to set Asterisk up to build using autoconf if people
> > > are interested.
> >
> >  me too , i guess to use autotools could be a great improvement for
> > asterisk.
>
> Actually, what is the advantage exactly? Current asterisk build system
> using makefiles works just fine.

Actually, the existing makefiles have some problems. 

For example, I am putting together an ebuild for Gentoo Linux right now. 
Under Gentoo, and many other packaging systems, the files are first
installed in a temporary directory, then copied from there to their final
destinations. The existing makefiles don't support this kind of functionality
(I have patches I will submit shortly). When you use autoconf, this
stuff comes for free as part of the infrastructure. Otherwise, you have
to build it yourself over time. 

> If you want system-dependent stuff-like config.h it can be generated in a
> toplevel makefile from a shellscript/perlscript/whatever.

That is essentially what autoconf does for you. It is a standard 
structure for managing the tests for different features and conditionally
compiling things. It is a waste of time building this infrastructure for 
yourself. 

>
> Infesting the huge mess that is autoconf doesnt seem to make much sense,
> especially if...

Cross platform makefiles are a pain; autoconf makes it easier. You haven't 
lived till you have maintained makefiles by hand to build shared libraries on 
Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, AIX, and Windows :-)

I agree that autoconf can be a bit messy, but it has its benefits, and it 
is relatively standard in the open source world. 

Another alternative would be SCons (http://www.scons.org). 
SCons is a make replacement written in Python which includes a fair
amount of autoconf functionality. It is much cleaner
than shell/make, but requires Python. 
See http://www.scons.org/doc/HTML/scons-man.html for details. 

>
> >  I was talking yesterday on the irc channel about that , but the problem
> >  to use autoconf/etc ... it that someone should mantain that and nobody
> >  wants/can do it at the moment .
>
> ... nobody wants to maintain it.

I can submit some patches and see how people feel about them. 
Maintaining them is not so bad. 

There is a good book available online here: 
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/
That is what I learned from.

And here some tutorials:
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~lf/tutorials/autoconf/
http://autotoolset.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html

Jake