Adding Autoconf and automake support to ROOT

From: Matthew D. Langston (LANGSTON@SLAC.stanford.edu)
Date: Thu Feb 13 1997 - 07:17:32 MET


  Hello all,

	I would like to contribute to the root project by adding
  Autoconf and automake support.  This has several advantages, which I
  list below:

    1) ROOT would become truly portable to many more systems, which is
       to say, as portable as any GNU software is.

    2) Because of 1), people not familiar with CMZ who use platforms
       for which ROOT binaries are not currently available would now
       be able to download root.{tar.gz|zip|saveset} and do a simple
       `./configure; make' and have a working ROOT package.

    3) Because of 2), there would potentially be many more users of
       ROOT, which would give the developers more useful feedback and
       bug reports, and expand the collective knowledge of the user
       community.

    4) Other forms of distribution of the root binaries become
       available.  For example, I (and/or others) would be able to
       trivially contribute ROOT RPMs to the Linux community.

  However, I'm afraid I'm not a CMZ power user and therefore don't
  have the expertise to bootstrap myself into my proposed project.  I
  have read the CMZ User's Guide from front to back, with the CMZ
  Reference Manual at my side.  However, I'm afraid CMZ is still a
  mystery to me.

	What I am looking for is a CMZ wizard to help me bootstrap
  this project.  Ultimately what I need is the source code (all of it,
  not just conditionalized for my particular system) in my filesystem.
  The source code in the CMZ file is already conditionalized, which is
  90% of the work when converting an existing software package to
  Autoconf/automake.

	However, when I do a CXTRACT from //, I get only the code that
  has been conditionalized for my system.  Is there a way of turning
  the CMZ `+IF=...' construct into the CPP `#ifdef ...' or `#if
  defined(...)'  construct?  If not then it would be a nightmare to
  have to export the entire source tree for each CMZ variant of the
  source code and manually diff them against each other to manually
  create the CPP constructs.

	Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
--
Matt Langston
SLD, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
langston@SLAC.Stanford.EDU
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~langston
(415) 926-3279



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