Comments on: We interrupt this travelogue for some actual Metacity questions

By: Zack

Zack — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 21:16:59 +0000

ooh, good idea re making the filtering part of the build.

I realize I’m the lone voice in the wilderness with advocating use of handwritten, gmake-specific makefiles over automake. However, I am convinced the world would be a better place if everyone stopped using automake; the only practical way to do that is if everyone can instead expect to have access to a more powerful make implementation than the POSIX least common denominator; and GNU make is the obvious choice.

By: Dan Nicholson

Dan Nicholson — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:14:04 +0000

For the autotools part, there are a couple alternatives.

1. You could just make the filtering part of the build. So you have something like:

bin_SCRIPTS = foo
foo: foo.in
$(SED) -e ‘s/foo/bar/’ $$@

Then the install takes care of itself.

2. Hack it with install-*-local or install-*-hook like Rob says. This requires that you handle appropriate cleanup, too.

3. Clean, but maybe too dependent on automake internals: redefine the specific install command.

binSCRIPT_INSTALL = $(builddir)/filter

Where filter takes the input and output files as $1 and $2. If you look at a generated Makefile, you will see that this variable (or binPROGRAMS_INSTALL in the case of programs) is set to $(INSTALL_SCRIPT) by default. I suppose you could just redefine INSTALL_SCRIPT, but that would apply to the whole Makefile.

I would avoid the suggestion to have the Makefile be GNU make specific unless it’s the only sane course of action. This generally makes people upset.

By: Dave Neary

Dave Neary — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:07:12 +0000

About the Nebraska & Maine thing, it’s actually a little more complicated than proportional… all but 2 electors are awarded on a majority basis per congressional district, with the two “senate” EVs being awarded to the winner of the state’s popular vote.

So in Nebraska, for example, there is one EV available in the congressional district around Omaha, where Obama has a fighting chance, and in Maine, there is one district where McCain has a small chance of pinching it, but both states will be heavily red & blue respectively.

By: James Henstridge

James Henstridge — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:06:59 +0000

You probably want to maintain the same package name as the official ones, but use a version number like $LAST_RELEASED_VERSION+svn$REVISION-something, so that it appears newer than what you previously released but older than future releases.

As far as there being multiple binary packages for metacity in Ubuntu, I’d expect that they all come from the same source package (see https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/1:2.24.0-0ubuntu1 for an example). If you base your builds on the existing Ubuntu packaging, you should end up with the same set of binary packages.

By: James

James — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:36:57 +0000

The reason there are three packages is to save space – with 10+ architectures, even 2MB in metacity-common is 20MB saved on the mirrors.

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 11:19:13 +0000

@fatal:
I did actually try using “Replaces”, but it got eaten somewhere along the line between package creation and viewing it with apt-cache when it was in the PPA. I’ll read the policy more carefully, and play with lintian, and see what I missed. Thanks.

By: chpe

chpe — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:37:59 +0000

I guess you could just do it completely in Makefile.am, using noinst_PROGRAMS for the filter and an install-data-local rule that filters the file to a tempfile and then uses $(INSTALL_DATA) to install that.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:16:04 +0000

Yeah you just got hit by the debian package naming crap. Whatever they are trying to solve the abstraction leaks all over the place.

By: Rob

Rob — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:32:48 +0000

Hi,

below is some (untested) automake snippet that should do (if i understood your problem). Let me know if there’s any problems.

***

noinst_PROGRAMS = filter

filter_SOURCES = filter.c

filtee_place = $(datadir)/foo

install-data-local:
./filter $(filtee_place)/filtee.txt

uninstall-local:
rm $(filtee_place)/filtee.txt

By: fatal

fatal — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 06:15:44 +0000

Use Provides + Conflicts + Replaces …. see the debian policy further details about each.