Hi, Frank.
First, note that my english is very bad, so I can't explain myself well. If you find any rude expression it's no my intention, it's my bad english.
Frank Heckenbach escribió:
Not at this time, note that makefiles are valid/tested only for the four supported platforms. For the (few) people interested in compile GRX in other platforms the changes they must to do to makefiles are easy.
Then you may want to change your web site which says: "On X11, it must work on any X11R5 (or later) system."
Of course, I'd consider this a bad choice, since it doesn't seem to take much to make it portable to non-Linux X11 systems.
I tried to mean thant I can't maintain makefiles for other plattforms, because I can't check it. Note the complete sentence is "On X11, it must work on any X11R5 (or later) system after a few changes to makefiles". I think is correct.
Nevertheless if changes don't affect the supported palttforms, they will be welcome.
- The install target(s) should created the directories (e.g. include, lib, info) before trying to write into them. This is particularly necessary when installing in a temp dir in order to build a binary distribution. (I didn't make a patch for that yet.)
I'm not sure if we must do it.
If you don't, then install will copy, say, grx.h to a file called include instead of a file grx.h in a (non-existing) directory include.
Ok, my doubts was about the convenience to expand the /usr/local tree without user permission.
- /etc/infodir seems to be hard-coded in the makefile. That's bad! (Not everyone is root. ;-) I strongly suggest this directory to be configurable, and to make the whole install-info stuff optional
Ok, but people who use the install target are suposed to be root anyway.
IMHO a very unfortunate attitude, also known as "Linux arrogance". There are actually Unix systems where not every user is or can become root (like, e.g., me on our university's machines), and they might want to install things in their home directory (which works with GRX except for the hard-coded /etc in one place).
Ops! I wanted to mean, that the automatic install target is normally for the superuser, normal users can move by hand the four files to the location they want (and the readme file says what files to move). And the console linux target don't work at all if you are not supersuser, because it uses svgalib.
Really I'm not a linux advocate, my main plattform is DJGPP (and Mingw now), when I began maintaining GRX (because no one wanted to do it) I must to learn how to work with Linux. My work enviroment is HP-UX, but because I maintain GRX in my free time at home, this was not an option.
Besides, as I said, one might want to build a binary distribution ...
(or get rid of it at all -- something like @dircategory and @direntry in the texi file might be better, since it allows the system tools which (re)build the info directory to recognize it).
Sorry, I don't know well TexInfo to understand this.
Something like the following:
@dircategory Libraries @direntry
- GRX: (grx). The GRX Graphics Library.
@end direntry
Ok, thanks, where we must leave the info file?, what utility must the user run after?
Greetings, M.Alvarez