[GEM-dev] Gem autobuilds (was Re: [ pd-gem-Bugs-1771966 ] texturing movies pegs CPU using fglrx/ATI Radeon X1x00)

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
> Thanks for testing this!  One last request from me on this, could you  
> try a nightly build of Pd-extended too?  I want to make sure that  
> these fixes are being included in the builds.


unfortunately Gem currently breaks the autobuild on most machines.

the reason for this is that i watched claude suffer from the configure 
script not making clear whether it actually found the pd-headers or not.
you had two choices: either ignore configures output and just run make, 
to see the compilation process (why do we have configure then?). or 
scroll up the the configure-output to see what it prints as the 
Pd-version: "0.0" would indicate "not-found".

so now configure will exit with an error-code at the very end, if it 
cannot find the pd-headers. (i prefer to do that at the very end, so 
people need fewer interactive configure-cycles if things are missing)

unfortunately, this behaviour (which i found improved) breaks the 
current pd-extended builds. i tried to fix it, but it seems like i don't 
fully understand how it works:

it seems like pd-extended is trying to do as follows:
1. run Gem's "make configure"
2. run "aclocal && autoconf"
3. run "./configure" with a lot of arguments
4. run "make"

steps 2 might be platform dependent, but i am not sure.
all in all i don't understand the confusion between 1 and 2.
#1 is supposed to build a working "configure" script via Gem's 
build-system. #2 is supposed to build a working "configure" script 
manually. why do it 2 times?

the obivous problem is, that Gem's "make configure" also run's 
./configure itself (to create the missing Make.config), which fails 
since it cannot find m_pd.h

the obvious solution is to not run "configure" when doing "make 
configure" (which i am gonna try and fix), but i still would like to 
understand the reasoning for the double autoconf stuff.

a workaround would be to supply the configureflags to "make" (or at 
least "make configure") with something like
   CONFIGUREFLAGS="--with-pd=/path/to/pd --disable-ffmpeg make"

i have added something like this to the packages/Makefile (is this the 
right place?), but it has been ignored for todays debian-stable build.



mfga.dsr
IOhannes