[Libguestfs] Building libguestfs from git

[Eric Blake]

On 11/19/19 2:24 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 01:47:18PM -0600, Eric Blake wrote:
>> On 11/17/19 11:04 AM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>>> On Sun, Nov 17, 2019 at 06:22:20PM +0200, Nir Soffer wrote:
>>>> Looks like libguestfs build is broken, or not documented properly.
>>>>
>>>> I tried (based on http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-building.1.html):
>>>
>>> Quite possibly, it's early days.  One thing you will definitely need
>>> to do is:
>>>
>>>    git submodule init
>>>    git submodule update
>>
>> Should ./autogen.sh take on this role automatically?
> 
> Probably, although I'm not quite sure how ./autogen.sh comes about.
> Is it an arbitrary script that every project rewrites?  How is it
> related to ./bootstrap?

./autogen.sh and ./bootstrap are the two most common names for said 
script (I prefer bootstrap, as there is an actual project named Autogen 
that is unrelated to what autogen.sh typically does).  And yes, it tends 
to be something that each project writes: neither Autoconf nor Automake 
provide the script.  I'm not aware of any place that purports to provide 
a commonly reusable ./autogen.sh; gnulib does provide a 
somewhat-reusable ./bootstrap (which may work for libguestfs as it uses 
gnulib, but won't work for things like nbdkit that can't use gnulib). 
So we get to tweak it however we want, and copy-and-paste things that 
work from one place to another.


> 
> Looking at git history, it seems I added a trivial version which just
> did autoreconf back in 2009, and most of the work was done on it early
> on by Jim Meyering.
> 
> Rich.
> 

-- 
Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc.           +1-919-301-3226
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