skeletal makefile for ftinspect (Re: Future of autotools)

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Not really a big fan of cmake/qmake/meson, I thought I'll give it a try, both 
to revise my makefile-fu, and perhaps as an educational tool for one of the 
gsoc people struggling with makefiles.

Here is a bare-minimum sketetal makefile for building ftinspect. It is written 
to be minimal, it builds, and the resulting binary seems to work, but since I 
have never used ftinspect, I don't know if the result does or does not work 
correctly.

Do "make -f ftinspect.mk", and if it finds all the QT5 bits on your system (a 
few variables towards the top, edit them yourself), it should just build 
ftinspect. There is a "make -f ftinpect.mk clean" target to clean up too.

The fragment is written with the idea that it can be eventually loadable by 
another. Current ft2-demo already do such for "./graph/rules.mk".

- ideally it should be "include"d somewhere in the middle of the main Makefile, 
like graph/rules.mk, and inherit the values of some of the variables (*CFLAGS).
- adjusting paths (adds in some  $(OBJ_DIR2)) and libtool adaptation (change 
the explicit $(CXX) comple/link actions with libtool $(COMPILE) abtractions). 
- remove the "clean" target and merge its work with the main one.

I'd be interested to know if the build binary is broken, or seems to do the 
job, either way.

Have fun adapting it...




On Monday, 10 July 2023 at 13:05:58 BST, Hugh McMaster 
<hugh.mcmaster@outlook.com> wrote:


I've been preparing an update to the Debian package of FreeType and
realised ftinspect is limited to the meson build system only. Debian,
by default, has always used autotools.

There are three build systems currently available for use in FreeType:
autotools, cmake and meson. As I understand past discussions,
autotools is the default (and fully supported).

If ftinspect and, potentially, other software is not going to be built
via autotools, is there a case to move to another build system?

Hugh

ftinspect.mk
Description: application/wine-extension-mk