On 11/20/05, Steven P. Ulrick <lists-fedora@...1052...> wrote:
On Sun, 20 Nov 2005 04:58:14 +0000 Ben Fowler <ben.the.mole@...400...> wrote:
I am not sure that I know exactly what you are doing!
Well, let's see. What I am trying to do is find differences between the release tarballs and the CVS tree. ...
May I start with some general comments?
When a package is distributed in source form, it should (IHMO) contain a ./configure script so that a user can build it using these simple(!) commands:
$ ./configure $ make $ make test $ make -n install $ sudo make install
or the required subset.
However, developers working from CVS do not necessarily want the (generated) ./configure script under source control, in the repository.
See http://sources.redhat.com/ml/automake/2003-02/msg00038.html for a concise summary of this, which predates, BTW, the move from configure.in to configure.ac .
A search on Google has found no other accessible source for this info, and if you feel you need to be better informed, you might well want to review the 'Development Process' section of the Bean Book, particularly the pages from page 194.
Ob. dict. Although a little wordy the Bean Book is pretty much the only dead trees publication aimed at this level, and I would suggest that you get a copy of it, or the Turtle book http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/0596004486/colophon.html However, since I can't give an unmixed recommendation for either CVS or Subversion (most people would be better off with Mercurial, Monotone or Darcs), I must counsel you to be critical in reading either of those publications and not to get drawn into into details.
Now I am suggesting that most of the devs here have recent versions of autoconf and friends, a working intltool and the necessary libraries, and are able to generate the ./configure script.
It is not completely clear where you are having problems and whether these can be laid at the door of Fedora Core.
It is my belief that building Inkscape from CVS is not for the faint of heart. There are a large number of dependencies. See for example, the recent thread about gtkmm. You are very welcome to prove me wrong, of course. I would even suggest that you consider also working on an easier project. It would be a shame if you were put off contributing to open source graphic projects because of (admitted and very well known) infelicities in autotools which are nothing to do with graphics.
I am not sure that I could definitely say which have an easier learning curve and/or need help, but you might want to look at ImageMagick http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php , Tango http://www.actsofvolition.com/archives/2005/october/announcingthe , Scribus http://www.scribus.org.uk/ , Graphviz e.g. http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=9306 , and there are some others in Gnome that I don't know about, and perhaps dozens in Sourceforge.
I will deal with your other points later, if time permits: Otherwise you might find some help here http://gnome.org/~malcolm/i18n/
Ben