Re: NSPR build system

jon wrote:

> I'm looking for some help understanding NSPR's build system.  I've been 
> reading up on autoconf and automake, since I haven't used them before, 
> but building NSPR is clearly more complex than a vanilla build using 
> configure.in and Makefile.am files.  Is there any documentation covering 

NSPR uses autoconf (version 2.13) but it does not use automake.

The NSPR build system was created long before automake existed, and has many 
of the same features as automake. A rough summary of the build system goes 
like this:

* configure.in is an M4 script which defines configuration options. It is 
tranformed into the configure shell script using "autoconf-2.13".


* Makefile.in files are in each build directory. When configure is run, they 
are transformed into Makefile by substituting @VARNAMES@. They typically 
include the following sections:

include $(DEPTH)/config/autoconf.mk - this file contains the build 
configuration variables set during configure

include $(topsrcdir)/config/config.mk - this file sets up makefile variables

set variables such as CRSCS and HEADERS

include $(topsrcdir)/config/rules.mk - this file sets the makefile rules for 
compiling files, installing headers, etc

--BDS