[GNC-dev] swig as permanent build requirement

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Thu May 16 14:02:33 EDT 2019


Op donderdag 16 mei 2019 17:08:25 CEST schreef Derek Atkins:
> Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> writes:
> > For starters despite our advice several people still prefer to build in
> > source. It appears this notion of a separate build directory is not
> > ingrained deeply into the development ecosystem.
> 
> *I* like to build in source!
> 
> Or, more technically, I use lndir to create a symlink tree build dir and
> then build from there.  So *technically* srcdir = .
> 
I believe that would confuse the build system if we adopt John's suggestion of testing for the 
presence of swig-foo.c to determine whether to run swig or not.

> >> Versioning of releases shouldn't change either: We want the release to be
> >> gnucash-3.6 and a post-release Github tarball to build
> >> gnucash-3.6-whatever.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > can't tell the exact source revision. We could even print out a set of
> > commands to run in the source directory to convert it into a git work tree
> > (git init/git remote add/...). Something like that. I think this may be
> > more encouraging to newcomers: they did manage to complete a build, they
> > have gnucash running. And while running it for the first time they get
> > advice on how to proceed to a more supported building method.
> 
> Another alternative is just print "GITHUB RELEASE XXX" and grab XXX from
> the top-level directory name?

The top-level directory name can be anything and not related to git or github at all. It depends 
on where a user extracts the zip file.

I've only found one reference to the commit the zipfile is generated from: there's a note 
embedded in the zipfile. The note gets printed when unzipping the files, or Ark displays it when 
examining the zip file. But it's not stored in any file or used as directory name for anything in 
the unzipped directory.

Geert


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