[Bf-committers] comments

[Frederick Lee]

On Sun, Dec 01, 2002 at 05:48:22AM -0500, Peter Amstutz wrote:
[snip]
> First, I'd like to say that it's great to finally be seeing some progress
> towards making Blender a full fledged open source project.  That said, I
> have a few comments and questions:
> 
> * I noticed that the 'configure' script is included in CVS.  In general,
> I've found that it's bad to store anything that can be autogenerated in
> CVS, since it tends to change a lot, so it wastes a lot of repository
> space (and "configure" is huuuge!); also users who are using CVS checkouts
> are usually by definition savvy hackers who can deal with little things
> like automake and autoconf :-)

Having configure and the Makefile.in files in the tree is for the sake
of people with old, broken, or missing autotools installation.  That's
what I recall what the plan was.

> * Is this the main development mailing list?  Right now I'm still very

Yes.

> confused as to where the locus of Blender development is, and how one
> should stay up-to-the-minute on the status of Blender.  I want to extend
> Blender to use it as an editor for multi-user Virtual Reality worlds
> (http://interreality.org), but before I can do that I need to figure out
> where the developer community is (people who are actually working on
> Blender, and not just talking about it).
> 
> * I'm trying to build the autoconf scripts and keep getting:
> configure.ac: 145: macro `AM_PATH_PYTHON' not found in library
>   is this harmless?

No.  As I recall, AM_PATH_PYTHON defines the macros PYTHON_VERSION and
PYTHON_PREFIX (among others), which are rather critical to compiling
the python components in Blender.  The aclocal m4 file for python is
packaged with automake-1.6.x (at least, the automake I have came with
the python.m4).

> * I'm getting the following error when I try to compile, after running
> configure (I did rebuild the autoconf scripts which may be my problem):
> 
> $ make
> make[1]: Entering directory `/home/tetron/hack/blender'
> cd . && /bin/sh /home/tetron/hack/blender/missing --run autoheader
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/tetron/hack/blender'
> cd . \
>   && CONFIG_FILES= CONFIG_HEADERS=[config.h] \
>      /bin/sh ./config.status config.status: creating [config.h]
> config.status: creating [config.h]
> config.status: error: cannot find input file: [config.h].in
> make: *** [stamp-h1] Error 1

Upgrade autoconf.  And probably automake as well.  The minimum version
for autoconf is 2.54 (or stick in changequotes([,]) at the beginning of
configure.ac).  I don't know what the minimum for automake is, but I
use 1.6.3 on my dev box (Debian unstable).

> I'll look into this more later (I'm about to go to sleep).  I've done a
> fair bit of autohacking on other projects so it shouldn't be too hard to
> figure out..
[snip]

Cheers,
-Fred