For the past few weeks, I have been working on improving the Gnome build infrastructure. It is something that we have needed to do for a long time. Most of Gnome is still using automake-1.4 because they rely on bugs that have since been fixed, and don’t handle the readonly sourcdir builds that “make distcheck” does with newer automakes.
So far I have been working on updating the various build tools that Gnome uses to reduce the amount of work needed to update a package’s build infrastructure. So far, I have updated the gnome-common package, removing most of the macros it contained and doing significant updates to the shared autogen.sh script, and gtk-doc (adding code to separate out the common section of the docs makefiles everyone is using).
To test things out, I recently ported glib over to using Automake 1.7. The patch is currently in its second revision, and waiting for another review. Afterwards, I might look at doing a bit of documentation on how to update a package — I don’t intend to do the conversion for every package in CVS …