Radically improve autogen.sh - cannot build trunk.

[David Reiser]

On Nov 6, 2005, at 10:43 AM, Neil Williams wrote:

> [snip]
>
> I have and it did not allow me to build gnucash on a system that  
> had built it
> under the old script. I had to actually uninstall certain auto  
> tools which
> has meant a MAJOR PITA for me because I am now completely unable to  
> update
> gnucash1.8 because the auto tools are too recent. I cannot build  
> 1.8 with the
> auto tools that G2 now needs.
>
> IMHO, that is *not* an improvement to the overall situation.
>
> [snip]
> Neil Williams
> =============

But this is just a 30 second annoyance with fink, maybe less for  
those command line inclined. I use FinkCommander, pick the autotool I  
need and click install. By this time, fink just puts the other  
version in my local fink archive, pulls the binary for the one I want  
now out of the archive and sets it up.

I found this out by accident. Once I learned the guile16-build trick,  
autogen finally got past telling me my guile 1.6 wasn't good enough,  
whereupon I discovered several unsatisfied dependencies. Some of  
those require automake1.8, and fink obligingly downgraded me before  
installing the dependencies. I happened to look at autoxxx and  
noticed I'd been downgraded from the day before, selected the newest  
one, hit install, and I was back to 1.9 in no time at all.

I'm very new at modern development schemes. I kind of prefer scons to  
automake, but perhaps rekall is simpler than gnucash.  Right now I'm  
just trying to keep from drowning in stuff that's obvious to real  
developers, but I'm a lot closer to being able to test the g2 version  
of gnucash than I was a couple weeks ago.

Dave