Re: tarball should include m4-files needed for autoconf

Hi,

Matthias Schwarzott wrote:
> On Montag, 26. Februar 2007, Steven M. Schultz wrote:
> 
>>On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Matthias Schwarzott wrote:
>>
>>>Next simple suggestion:
>>>Please include the m4 files needed to regenerate configure into your
>>>tarball.
>>
>>	No.
>>
>>	Any reasonable system has gtk and glib present.  SDL is used for
>>	playing video which seems to be a reasonable thing to do for a
>>	video related package.

But the SDL development package is not that widely installed. By far the most
multimedia packages nowadays don't use SDL (for a reason).

>>	I have never liked bundling in m4 files - so I would rather this not
>>	be done to mjpegtools.
>>
>>	Steven Schultz
>>
>>
> 
> 
> That means you wanna tell me:
> SDL is optional, but if I want to regenerate configure (because I needed to 
> change something), I am forced to install sdl just for that?

This is usual practice, also for other projects. Users (the ones who call
configure; make) need only mandatory requirements, developers (the ones who
call ./autogen.sh) need much more (like libtool, automake, autoconf plus
all m4 files). If bundled, every time the sdl.m4 file is changed upstream,
the mjpegtools tree would have to be changed as well. And developers have
better things to do than syncing .m4 files :)

> It seems that gtk.m4 is no longer necessary as checked by pkgconfig now, but 
> sdl.m4 still is.

> And I normally do not want to install sdl just to be able to compile 
> mjpegtools WITHOUT sdl support to get mplex.

2 other solutions:

- Convince libsdl people to use pkg-config and update mjpegtools accordingly

- cat <path_to>/sdl.m4 >> acinclude.m4; cvs commit

   and hope it will detect future versions as well

Burkhard

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT
Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your
opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash
http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV