The short version: we're looking for someone with knowledge of
autotools, ebuilds, and, ideally, the eclasses from kde-sunset
(which is why I'm posting this here) who's willing to contribute a
bit of time to help us unravel a mysterious build failure.
The long version: Trinity, the fork of KDE3, is currently in the
middle of converting from the old autotools-based KDE build system
to a more maintainable setup based on cmake.
I'm part of a small group of people (currently two-and-a-fraction)
trying to package Trinity for Gentoo and related distros (for a little
info on where we're at, see
http://wiki.hasnoname.de/tde:trinity-overlay_on_funtoo_gentoo ).
What we've found is that the packages that have already been
converted to cmake can easily be wrapped with ebuilds, but some
of the autotools-based packages break.
Upstream is not doing anything but the most vital fixes to the
autotools system—they're really short on manpower. That means
creating a patch to handle the problem until the cmake conversion
is complete, which is likely to be at least a year in the future . . . and
this is where our group is running into problems, because we don't
have anyone who understands Makefile syntax at the level needed
to grasp everything going on in the old build system.
The best we've managed to be able to do is get the builds to reach
the linker stage, where they break due to missing libraries which we
seem to be unable to reinject—append-libs and various methods of
manipulating LDFLAGS within the ebuilds seem to do nothing. Our
attempts to work on the build system itself have so far only resulted
in it failing earlier.
<small_voice>Help?</small_voice>
autotools, ebuilds, and, ideally, the eclasses from kde-sunset
(which is why I'm posting this here) who's willing to contribute a
bit of time to help us unravel a mysterious build failure.
The long version: Trinity, the fork of KDE3, is currently in the
middle of converting from the old autotools-based KDE build system
to a more maintainable setup based on cmake.
I'm part of a small group of people (currently two-and-a-fraction)
trying to package Trinity for Gentoo and related distros (for a little
info on where we're at, see
http://wiki.hasnoname.de/tde:trinity-overlay_on_funtoo_gentoo ).
What we've found is that the packages that have already been
converted to cmake can easily be wrapped with ebuilds, but some
of the autotools-based packages break.
Upstream is not doing anything but the most vital fixes to the
autotools system—they're really short on manpower. That means
creating a patch to handle the problem until the cmake conversion
is complete, which is likely to be at least a year in the future . . . and
this is where our group is running into problems, because we don't
have anyone who understands Makefile syntax at the level needed
to grasp everything going on in the old build system.
The best we've managed to be able to do is get the builds to reach
the linker stage, where they break due to missing libraries which we
seem to be unable to reinject—append-libs and various methods of
manipulating LDFLAGS within the ebuilds seem to do nothing. Our
attempts to work on the build system itself have so far only resulted
in it failing earlier.
<small_voice>Help?</small_voice>