On Wed, 11 Aug 2004, Felix Rabe wrote:
On http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?CompilingInkscape , section "Developer Compilation", I added "libtoolize --copy --force" (that's Revision 58 of CompilingInkscape) to the example after finding out somewhere that this solves the problem. (At least it did for me.) This line might need to be added to other sections (the missing ltmain.sh seems to be described there though) and INSTALL as well...
Cool thanks. Can you post a patch to the patch tracker for adding the correct info to the INSTALL file?
Unfortunately (?) by looking for this solution I also found out that I'm not the only one not being able to fully understand the autotools - it's sadly rather the other way round as it seems - i.e., almost nobody seems to understand it.
Yeah, there's a known cargo-culting issue with automake. :-/
In summary (describing what I remember from some articles I read), automake seems to be the most troublesome of the autotools toolchain, but you can't really replace it or the toolchain because there's already so terribly much work and knowledge invested into it so that newer autotools replacements are automatically disqualified because of their recency.
Right.
What do you folks think? Was there already a discussion on shifting the Inkscape build environment to something else on Jabber / this list / somewhere else? What was the result?
We've not discussed moving away from automake afaik. I doubt we'd ever seriously consider that due to issues such as the ones you've outlined about newer solutions being too new. Probably the best solution is for some of us to just to bite the bullet and learn it. I know at least a couple people have been doing this. This is definitely one of the weaker skill areas in Inkscape, so anyone interested in developing those skills would be very encouraged to do so.
Bryce