I started reading through the docs for autotools and found them rather nasty. It was really tough to figure out where to start with it, so I started asking around for help. Many of my friends recommended dumping autotools in favor of a more straightforward configure/build system,
downloads page...Now, once you have SCons and Python, and have checked out the SCons tree, build VDrift thus:<pre>cd vdrift-sconsscons </pre>To see optional components type<pre>scons -h </pre>This will list the only option I've configured so far, fmod. To compile with fmod:<pre>scons fmod=1 </pre>The default is to compile with openal. Sadly, I haven't worked all the bugs out yet, and compiling with openal fails for me. This will be fixed soon (in fact, I'm hoping Joe will take a look at it for me and tell me what I've botched :wink
.So far, I really like SCons. It has a lot of things going for it - it seems faster, it doesn't involve cryptic M4 macros or shell scripts, no need even for a separate configure script and Makefile, it wraps it all up into one file ("SConstruct", and in the subdirectories "SConscript") - which drastically reduces clutter in the root directory of the VDrift tree. It has as much flexibility as the Python programming language. In only a few hours I set up what we already have (a configure + build system with an optional library). I even improved on it slightly - now everything under src/vamos/ is compiled as a library that is linked with vdrift when it gets compiled. Best of all it seems easy to work with. I don't think it will be very hard to adapt the build system for other libraries or options in the future, namely setting up install targets.So, if all of you who usually follow the latest in the SVN tree could check this out and try it, and please let me know what you think. This may become VDrift's permanent configure/build system if it works OK for everyone.
