[libdvdnav-devel] Easier Autotools Invocation?

[Timothy Gu]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 6:23 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro
<ldo at geek-central.gen.nz> wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2014 17:40:49 -0700, Timothy Gu wrote:
>
>> On Oct 2, 2014 4:51 PM, "Lawrence D'Oliveiro"
>> <ldo at geek-central.gen.nz> wrote:
>>>
>>>     ./bootstrap && ./confgure && make -j$(nproc)
>>
>> Doesn't autoreconf -fi do the same thing?
>
> Just tried it with the DVDAuthor source tree, and it throws this error:
>
> configure.ac:130: error: required file 'autotools/config.rpath' not found

This is not a problem with `autoreconf`, but with DVDAuthor's configure.ac.

It uses the m4 macro AM_ICONV (iconv.m4), which depends on config.rpath.

However, iconv.m4 and config.rpath are bundled with GNU gettext, and
therefore config.rpath is automatically installed with a `autopoint`
(formerly `gettextize`) run. However, DVDAuthor doesn't use gettext,
and therefore when you use `autoreconf`, it it skips over `autopoint`,
and therefore skipping over installing config.rpath.

Right now your bootstrap script works around this by:

    cp /usr/share/gettext/config.rpath autotools/

The only sane solution is to bundle config.rpath (and even iconv.m4)
with the source. Or you will need to add a dependency on gettext,
which is not even used by DVDAuthor. Even worse, you have to use a
`cp` hack.

libdvdread and libdvdnav does not use AM_ICONV at all, so no such
problems exist.

This problem is quite uncommon as I have never encountered it before.

By the way, please use `autoreconf -i` instead. `-f` flag overwrites
files like INSTALL.

Timothy