[GenABEL-dev] ProbABEL autotools integration branch in SVN

[Yury Aulchenko]

> The 'almost' I referred to earlier relates to the doc directory. At this
> moment there is no automake Makefile.am yet for that directory. There
> are two reasons for that:
> 1) I'm not yet sure how to go about this. As far as I know there is no
> automake support for LaTeX to PDF yet. However, I think I could put the
> old Makefile rules in there with a little tweaking to make it work
> 2) If we follow 1) and don't store the pdf in SVN, we force all users
> who want to install ProbABEL to have a functioning LaTeX install
> (./configure doesn't check for this AFAIK). I don't think we want to add
> LaTeX to the ProbABEL dependencies.
> Any suggestions on this issue is much appreciated. 


Did run into this problem after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion (which messed up and Latex does not work anymore)

./configure worked like magic -- amazing to see ProbABEL doing this!

./make resulted in 
...
g++ -DCOXPH -I ../src/include -g -O2   -o pacoxph pacoxph-coxfit2.o pacoxph-chinv2.o pacoxph-cholesky2.o pacoxph-chsolve2.o pacoxph-dmatrix.o pacoxph-main.o pacoxph-AbstractMatrix.o pacoxph-CastUtils.o pacoxph-convert_util.o pacoxph-FileVector.o pacoxph-FilteredMatrix.o pacoxph-frutil.o pacoxph-Logger.o pacoxph-RealHandlerWrapper.o pacoxph-ReusableFileHandle.o pacoxph-Transposer.o    
make[1]: *** No rule to make target `doc/ProbABEL_manual.pdf', needed by `all-am'.  Stop.
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1

I coud not figure out how to solve this without installing latex -- at least not within 30 minutes. My conclusion -- for many people this may be a problem. Installing LaTex now :)

So, what we do? I would indeed think of keeping PDF in the SVN/source distrib + remove building pdf's by default. May be best solution would be to introduce an option

./configure --compile-doc [default --no-compile-doc]

other very useful option would be to specify where to "make install" -- e.g. if I do not have root permissions, and what to install to ~/bin, the only option I can see for the moment is manually copying binaries after "make".

?? Would that be easy ? I must admit I was terrified trying to understand how autoconf works on a short notice. 

Lennart, would you have a suggestion for good (short) overview of autotools?

best wishes,
Yurii