dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <jjan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 10:18:28PM +0200, Anders Logg wrote:
> I have updated configure.ac (one line) so that a file dolfin.pc is now
> automatically generated from dolfin.pc.in.
> 
> This file serves the same purpose as our script dolfin-config. This
> script was modelled after gtk-config, but that was a while ago and
> since then GTK, GNOME etc have moved to pkg-config, which is the
> standard.
> 
> Here's how it works:
> 
>     dolfin-config --cflags   -->   pkg-config dolfin --cflags
>     dolfin-config --libs     -->   pkg-config dolfin --libs
> 
> I have updated the Makefile in src/demo/pde/poisson, so please try it
> out and see how it works. For this to work, you need to do
> 
>     export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=`pwd`
> 
> in the build directory. We'll need to fix so that dolfin-config gets
> installed to the right location during make install.
> 

Nice, the more standard tools we can use the better (less custom work
for us).

> Some things to consider:
> 
> 1. pkg-config does not have any --compiler and --linker flags, but
> maybe we can just replace these with g++ in the example Makefiles?

I'll take a look. Hopefully there's a way for pkg-config to provide
extra information.

> 
> 2. We need to make this work with the build of PyDOLFIN. Johan, can
> you see what might be missing?

I'll take a look.

> 
> 3. What is our long-term plan for the build system? To continue with
> autotools? Or should we move to Scons? I have suggested Scons earlier,
> but I'm not as convinced as I used to be. I have seen Scons in use up
> close in another project here at Simula and Scons seems to be able to
> generate just as much headache as autotools.
> 

Ok, too bad. I think autotools performs sufficiently well, so there's
no crisis. If we decide to stick with autotools for the short term, I
think there are some improvements we can do to the build system. I
would like to look into a flat Makefile to simplify dependency
construction for example. But it's not top priority, I guess we'll get
there eventually.

  Johan