[PATCH weston] configure.ac: make use of wayland-scanner.pc

[Emil Velikov]

On 23 February 2015 at 22:32, Bill Spitzak <spitzak at gmail.com> wrote:
> wayland-scanner is built as part of "make" in wayland. However it is also
> used to convert the xml descriptions to .c and .h files, which are also used
> by "make".
>
> In some early versions of Wayland this would never work for a new user. It
> would not find wayland-scanner and fail, so "make install" never worked and
> you could not get things working without doing a manual step of copying the
> wayland-scanner executable to the path.
>
> A big annoyance is that once you get wayland to install, this never happens
> again, leading the developers to not notice if it breaks.
>
> A related annoyance is that editing the source for wayland scanner should
> cause the .h/.C files to be regenerated using the new version and used to
> compile the rest of wayland and weston. This can make it easy to not realize
> a bug was introduced into wayland scanner.
>
So to sum it all up (see if I got it correct):
 - Wayland (as opposed to weston) issue
 - During a wayland build, there is a dependency of wayland-scanner.
 - One can manually work around the problem by copying wayland-scanner.
 - The dependencies are still not honoured and wayland-scanner never
gets rebuild and/or reused(reinstalled).

I would assume that removing wayland{,-scanner} and tracking down the
dependency sounds like a bit of a pain :-)

> My proposed test, with a --prefix to an install directory:
>
> 1. clear out the install directory
> 2. make sure "wayland-scanner" does not exist on the machine
> 3. go into wayland and type "make install"
>
> Another test I would like to do is:
>
> 1. Edit wayland-scanner to put an obvious typo into the .h file
> 2. Run "make" and insure that it fails.
>
Sounds like you might want to have a OBS(-like) [1] solution which
does a clean [2] build of wayland.


No disrespect but isn't all this somewhat orthogonal to what I'm
proposing/fixing, or did it just remind you of the problem ?

Thanks for the comprehensive explanation Bill :-)
Emil

[1] http://openbuildservice.org/
[2] Create a VM/container with the bare dependencies, with which one
builds the package.