Thread: Adding Library to Linux

Originally Posted by hosseinyounesi

This can be very hard according to the distribution and the different versions, maybe conflict between versions and so on.

No, it's actually not that much work -- altho learning to do it the first time is, because autotools is not very well documented anywhere. But once you understand it, it's as simple as this:

Code:

# Checks for libraries.
GTK_REQUIRED_VERSION=2.12.0

That's the minimum version that is known to work, this goes in "configure.ac". When the configure script generated from this by autoconf is run, if the min development libraries are not installed, you get a message like "configure could not find gtk-lib-devel >= 2.12...aborting". Then you know you have to install your distro's gtk-lib-devel package. Which is the only real hassle about compiling from source -- you do need to have development library headers installed, not just the library runtime packages.

Originally Posted by hosseinyounesi

Well, how can make configure and makefile files? I'm now using KDEVELOP, it makes these files but there is a problem: automake versions conflict or is not compatible I solved this problem by using autoreconf -fvi Other IDEs in Linux don't do this
Any EASY way to do this? Or wayS?

I don't use an IDE (and I don't program C++) so... Anyway I've only done the whole autotools routine a few times, with things that I actually distributed (and it worked). Here's my notes:

Code:

need:
Makefile.am for each dir
/configure.ac (could use autoscan)

then in order:
aclocal
automake -ac
autoheader
automake -ac again
autoconf

the actual commands are in bold. The reason for the second automake is that you need to run it before autoheader, but you need the file produced by autoheader (config.h.in) to do the automake properly.

The only manual work is writing the Makefile.am and configure.ac files. Here are the two links I used and bookmarked:
Introduction to GNU Build Tools (automake, autoconf, and configure Script)
GNU Automake By Example
Plus a little bit reading the man pages. When you're done you have a directory like this:

Code:

aclocal.m4  
autom4te.cache  
compile      
configure     
COPYING   
install-sh   
Makefile.in  
NEWS    
src/
AUTHORS     
ChangeLog       
config.h.in  
configure.ac  
depcomp  
INSTALL  
Makefile.am  
missing

Most of which autotools does. src/ contains the .c and .h files and another Makefile.am, and the file produced by automake from it, Makefile.in. If you've ever downloaded a source packaged and compiled it this should be familiar (if not, find something and try it, it's easy). Now the end user just unzips the tar ball and types:

./configure
make
make install

And maybe gets to watch gcc doing strange things for a minute. The Makefile can contain instructions for installing various components, like documentation, images, etc. in the right places in the filesystem.