[sane-devel] XSANE update on status

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Ralph, list,

Ralph Little writes:

> Hi,
> Just a quick update on where I am with XSANE development.

Thanks again for picking up XSANE maintenance and going beyond that
helping out with sane-backends issues!  :bow:

> AutoTools
> =============
> Currently, I am trying to fixup the autotools setup. This turned out to
> be quite a bit bigger job than I anticipated.
> The repo currently uses autoconf but it does not use libtool or automake
> (for sources).
> There are some suggestive signs that automake has been used at some
> point, but there are Makefile.in files but no Makefile.am sources.
> The Makefile.in files look to have been autogenerated at some point.
>
> It might be that Makefile.am files did exist but were missing from
> checkin. It is difficult to say.
> I am in the process of learning a lot about autotools and rebuilding
> this infrastructure so that we can remove a lot of that boilerplate from
> the repo.
> One of the problems with having static Makefiles is that they are pretty
> much stuck in time. Better to have these things generated and benefit
> from platform and infrastructure improvements since the 10+ years ago
> they were last substantially looked at.
>
> I know Olaf offered to give some assistance in this area, and it might
> be that I have to call in that offer at some point :D

You're welcome to call in (even though I'm a bit, eh, shall we say,
busy/swamped).

BTW, there is no hard requirment for autotools.  If you're more fluent
in something else, e.g. CMake, then converting to that is fine with me.
Autotools can be a bit arcane at times :-/

> For the moment though, I am learning a lot and making mistakes as is
> typical of this process.
>
> I thank you for your patience and hope that I can reward it with a more
> resilient and up-to-date set of sources to move forward with.

Looking forward to that,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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