[gst-devel] Re: compile errors

[Richard Boulton]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 02:26:08PM -0800, Erik Walthinsen wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Feb 2001, Lee Brown wrote:
> > aclocal: configure.in: 186: macro `AM_PATH_ESD' not found in library
> 
> This is a fundamental problem with the way autoconf does things.  The
> GNOME people are fixing this with pkgconfig, similar to the way I fixed it
> at OGI.  A single macro that will first check for a pkgconfig file for
> that package, return false if it doesn't exist, else use that to verify
> that the package really is installed.  Until then, things are rather
> messy.  aclocal.m4 actually isn't even in CVS, which makes it hard.  I
> suppose we could put it in CVS for now, but that's not fun, since it will
> put the m4's from whichever system it's generated on in CVS.

aclocal.m4 is a generated file and shouldn't therefore go in CVS.
There is a solution: the file acinclude.m4 (which _is_ in CVS) is read as
well as the system directories when aclocal is looking for macros: so the
ESD macro could be added to that.  The problem is that this _overrides_ any
system directories, so if there is a bugfix macro produced and installed at
a later date, the macro in acinclude.m4 will stop it being used.

> The best solution is to go ahead and install ESD.  If you're using GNOME,
> it should be installed already.  If not, just grab it from your
> distribution disk.  As long as you don't run it, there's no problem.
This is a better solution.  An even better solution would be to make
regular builds, check that the system compiles (and passes a test suite,
ideally) and make those available as tarballs.  Then, between releases,
non developers can just use the latest one of these rather than having to
build from CVS.

I'll try and set this up at some point.

-- 
Richard