Automake and libtool for Samba

Matt Peterson mpeterson at calderasystems.com
Mon Nov 20 19:16:46 GMT 2000


Jeremy Allison wrote:
> 
> Matt Peterson wrote:
> 
> > Automake and especially libtool have proven to be very valuable tools
> > for building portable open source projects.  Before we get too far into
> > this, it would be interesting to know why Samba does not use of these
> > tools.
> 
> Historical reasons. We looked at moving to libtool and automake,
> but we run on many more platforms than these are available for.
> 
> Moving to autoconf was originally difficult, I recall some
> issues with using libtool but not exactly what they were I'm
> afraid (Andrew - can you comment here ?).

Difficult but worth while... right?

> > If there are no objections, our patch will also include full a
> > automake/autoconf and libtool build system for all Samba binaries.
> >
> > Comments?
> 
> For HEAD (IMHO) this is probably ok. It may be more of
> a problem for 2.2.
> 

Understood. We're currently working off of HEAD and will continue with
plans to change the makes to use automake and libtool. Hopefully, the
new clean makes (with automake and libtool) will be attractive enough
that it would be interesting to users and developers on the 2.2 branch. 
It will be fairly easy to apply the makefile patches as we build RPMS so
our work will not be lost if the Samba Team feels like it would not be a
good idea to merge the changes into 2.2.  

We've tentatively scheduled development to submitting the following 4
patches:

1 - makefile changes to use automake and autoconf (Next week)

2 - header file changes to separate out what is needed for an externally
usable "smb.h" with out breaking builds of existing /bin binaries (first
or second week of December)

3 - makefile changes to build libsmb.so as well as possibly link changes
so that appropriate Samba /bin binaries also use the external libslp
(second week of December)

4 - HTML documentation (second week of December)


Does this sound acceptable?

-- 
Matthew Peterson
Sr. Software Engineer
Caldera Systems, Inc
mpeterson at caldera.com




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