Details of BOINC's new automake/autoconf build system

The BOINC build system uses autoconf 2.57 and automake 1.7.

Much of these instructions are generic to automake but are provided here for convenience.

Notes

• Maintainer mode

  The BOINC automake files use the maintainer-mode setting which by default disables automatic maintainer dependencies. If you modify makefiles or configure.ac you should enable them by adding the --enable-maintainer-mode option to configure:

              ./configure --enable-maintainer-mode
            

  You should modify only the Makefile.am files, which generate the Makefile.in files (and the configure script produced by autoconf will generate the Makefiles from those). If you don't have automake (or not a new enough version), the build system will warn you and continue without regenerating Makefile.in. (When checking out from CVS or extracting from a source distribution, sometimes make will think that the makefile.in files need to be regenerated because they aren't newer than the Makefile.am files.)

• Layout

  The top-level Makefile.am contains the SUBDIRS= line which sets up directory recursion, and the rules for creating source distributions.

  Each subdirectory's Makefile.am contains the rules for making the binaries and libraries in that directory and any extra files to distribute.

  Usually you will want to run make from the toplevel (the directory containing the file configure), but sometimes it is useful to run make and make check in certain subdirectories.

• Dependencies

  Automake takes care of all dependency issues. Calling make will automagically regenerate the dependencies themselves as necessary. This includes source dependencies (on header files) as well as Makefile dependencies (Makefile depends on Makefile.in which depends on Makefile.am).

• Expanding

  If you create a new directory with another Makefile.am, you should A) make sure the directory is referenced by a SUBDIRS= line from its parent Makefile.am and B) add it to the AC_CONFIG_FILES directive in configure.ac.

Tasks

• Compiling

  To compile, use the usual

              ./configure
              make
            

  Example using multiple build directories under a single source directory (assuming the same directory is mounted on milkyway and shaggy):

              milkyway$ mkdir build
              milkyway$ mkdir build/solaris2.7
              milkyway$ cd build/solaris2.7
              milkyway$ ../../configure
              milkyway$ make
  
              milkyway$ mkdir build/solaris2.7-gcc3
              milkyway$ cd build/solaris2.7-gcc3
              milkyway$ ../../configure CC=/opt/misc/gcc-3.0.4/bin/gcc CXX=/opt/misc/gcc-3.0.4/bin/g++
              milkyway$ make
  
              shaggy$ mkdir build/linux
              shaggy$ cd build/linux
              shaggy$ ../../configure
              shaggy$ make
            

• Testing

  To test the code:

              make check
            

  This runs the python tests in the test/ directory; requires Python2.2, MySQLdb. Old PHP-based tests in test/are also available to be run individually.

• Version number

  The version number is set in the line

              AC_INIT(BOINC, 1.03)
            

  in configure.ac. If you change this, run make and it will rebuild any files necessary to propagate the version number into source files and scripts (if maintainer-mode is on). This is the only location the version number is set (in unix); all other uses of it come from here (no environment variables used).

• Archiving

  To make source distributions:

              make dist
            

  This will make .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, and .zip files. You can also make only the individual ones using the make targets dist-bzip2, dist-gzip, dist-zip. The source distributions contain everything necessary to build and run the server, and also remake distributions.

  (There used to be a separate client distribution requiring complicated rules for picking subdirectories to compile and distribute, but it has been obsoleted because few people will download the distribution to build only the client.)

  There is also a very handy target:

              make distcheck
            

  In a temporary directory, make will extract the distribution tarball, make all, make check, make install (to another temporary directory). This simulates what the developer end-user can do with the tarball.

• Cleaning

  To clean out built object files:

              make clean
            

  To clean out built object files and generated files such as Makefile.in:

              make distclean