Have you forgotten that the large majority of GNU software packages,
projects on SourceForge, etc., are distributed with autotools, and compiled
and installed with autotools? That would certainly seem to indicate that
they can work.

Putting Cygwin and OS X into the mix certainly makes it more difficult; but
the Csound 5 build does indeed definitely work with autotools on Cygwin.
That leaves OS X.  I don't have a Mac. That means I'm depending on somebody
else testing and fixing the autotools build system on the Mac.

We would never be trying this if people hadn't had the sort of problems with
the previous makefile system that autotools are designed to solve.

What's your solution?

============================================
Michael Gogins
gogins at pipeline period com
Irreducible Productions
CsoundVST, an extended version of Csound for programming music and sound
Available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/csound/
============================================


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Dobson" 
To: "Csound Developers Discussion List" 
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2004 6:39 PM
Subject: [CSOUND-DEV:4093] Re: Major commits to Csound 5


> ALSA may already be second-choice on Linux now - PortAudio supports Jack
(for
> which an OS X port has also been announced), and quite probably an install
> system for linux may need at least to offer the possibioity of using Jack,
> rather than trying to drive (and install) ALSA directly.
>
> It worries me if versions of the autoconf tools are not backwards
compatible -
> something that the GNU advocates always criticise Windows for.
>
> And if "ordinary" end-users have to leap through the hoops you have
desccribed
> below, before thay can even start to install Csound, then I think this
whole
> approach must be called into question. In the time this has all taken,
with it
> not yet "all working" (and I remain unconvinced, on the evidence, that it
will
> eventually work - seems a major leap of faith to me!), we could probably
have
> implemented a bespoke installer program for each platform! I never thought
that
> "cross-platform" for the autoconf system meant anything beyond
> "cross-unix-variants". Windows users will want a version of setup.exe; and
OS X
> users will expect a disk image and a standard OS X Package inside it.
>
> For the record, with Panther and Xcode 1.1, I get the following versions:
>
> autoconf: 2.57
> automake: 1.6.3.
> libtool:  ??? no version option available.
>
> I suspect that asking OS X users to install special versions of these
tools is
> not an acceptable solution.
>
> Richard Dobson
>
>
>
> Michael Gogins wrote:
>
> > We all understand that your build system has worked for you.
> >
> > Please understand that your makefile-based build system has NOT worked
for
> > at least some of us, in spite of the fact that we greatly appreciate
your
> > work porting Csound to different platforms. We wouldn't even be having
this
> > discussion if you hadn't done that.
> >
> > We also understand that the current state of the build system does not
work
> > for you, and naturally we are concerned to remedy this.
> >
> > To get my build system working, I put the Csound5 files on my Red Hat
Linux
> > 8.0 laptop, and tried building the dependencies. I build most of them
except
> > for PortAudio, which wouldn't build because Red Hat 8 doesn't come with
ALSA
> > drivers. But Csound 5 wouldn't work because Red Hat 8's autotools aren't
> > current enough. I re-installed them from sources from the GNU home pages
for
> > autoconf, automake, and libtool. Then Csound 5 built OK -- until it
wanted
> > PortAudio.
> >
> > I started upgrading the ALSA drivers, and they had lots of dependencies
that
> > weren't satisfied, so I decided to upgrade to Fedora Core 1. I did that
(it
> > took most of the day). The PortAudio configure script still didn't work,
so
> > I found the workaround documented in the current Csound 5 configure.ac.
> > Finally, everything built.
> >
> > I would guess that a similar effort will probably be required on OS X
and
> > maybe on some of the other Linuxes as well.
> >
> > This is painful, but once things work, they seem to keep working.
> >
> > If you have ALSA on Linux, I would guess that you could get Csound 5
> > configure.ac and Makefile.am working by upgrading autotools from the
latest
> > sources, as I did.
> >
>
>

Yes of course they ~can~ work - e.g. within a limited range of  Linux-type 
unices. A message to the CLAM list today indicates similar problems with 
autoconf on OS X. We can assume that Apple have felt free to reinvent the 
directory structure and contents in their own way.  So I suggest that complete 
compatibility across this range of platforms remains unproven, and we must allow 
for the possibility that eventually there will be some proof of some 
unsurmountable problem. So we do need a "Plan B". Such as a custom installer 
program for each platform? Yes it may be a big job; but a huge amount of time 
and effort has been expended on this autoconf exercise, by very clever people, 
and if it still presents major difficulties, this suggests that the problem is 
in autoconf itself, which is being asked to deliver beyond its design parameters.

I would suggest that developers just ensure that they can get a build of Csound 
running on their platform, so they can resume work on Csound5 itself; and 
confront the issue of automatic build and installation systems once Csound5 is 
done, and we know what structure the source code will eventually have.

For Windows, the canonical requirement will be project files for Visual C++ and 
possibly DevCpp; and for OS X we will want Project Builder project files 
(including all dependencies such as PortAudio and libsndfile), and presumably 
Code Warrior ditto. The user will expect a simple disk image and package that 
installs everything requireed. If at this stage autoconf cannto be got to work 
even for the narrower range of Linux platforms, this ~must~ surely indicate a 
problen that cannot be overcome in a reasonable time-scale?


Richard Dobson




Michael Gogins wrote:
> Have you forgotten that the large majority of GNU software packages,
> projects on SourceForge, etc., are distributed with autotools, and compiled
> and installed with autotools? That would certainly seem to indicate that
> they can work.
> 
> Putting Cygwin and OS X into the mix certainly makes it more difficult; but
> the Csound 5 build does indeed definitely work with autotools on Cygwin.
> That leaves OS X.  I don't have a Mac. That means I'm depending on somebody
> else testing and fixing the autotools build system on the Mac.
> 
> We would never be trying this if people hadn't had the sort of problems with
> the previous makefile system that autotools are designed to solve.
> 
> What's your solution?
> 
>