Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] User Interface
From: Adam Zygmunt (azygmun_AT_bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 20:54:16 EEST
I realize that this particular topic has pretty well driven into the
ground the other day, and I don't want this to be seen as part of a
Paul Davis bashing session, but I thought what I'd do is document
what problems and annoyances I ran into in yet another unsuccessful
attempt to compile Ardour. FWIW, I've tried on numerous occasions
and spent countless hours over the last few months, with different
tarballs and CVS versions, to compile ardour and its libs with no
success. I consider myself to be a reasonbly advanced Linux user,
with plenty of experience getting tricky packages to compile. I've
just reformatted my hard drive and put a stock Red Hat 7.1 install
on, with some extra audio software (like glame) and libs installed,
rebuild from SRPMS whenever possible.
I figured this would be a great time to try again, and I could get
some useful information about the bugs in the process. I didn't
get very far before I got stuck, though. Here's what I ran into
this time, from the beginning of the download:
1. sourceforge CVS page never says which module (ardour) to download
Seems obvious, but without it ever being mentioned on the page...
2. Had to download quasimodo from CVS to get libs, directions
buried in README
I wouldn't mind the extra download time at all if these were
duplicated in the ardour CVS. In any case, the directions for
getting the libs could be more clear, either by putting CVS access
info on the ardour download page and/or putting the directions in the
INSTALL file, with the rest of the compilation hints.
3. script in Quasimodo README for lib compilation needed
This is just ugly, IMHO. If you need the script to make the libs,
why not put it in the source tree? Making the libs manually wouldn't
be too difficult, except that there are some irrelevant directories
(for ardour, anyway) in the source tree.
4. script in README for lib compilation very broken - no preexisting
configure files in the lib directories, and the script doesn't
create them.
5. install-sh missing from all lib directories
6. configure needs extra args by default (--disable-static
--enable-for-ardour --enable-for-gui)
This is just a personal annoyance, especially with library sources.
Will the libs work with ardour if compiled without these options?
Anyway, sensible defaults are good so the user doesn't have to worry
about this sort of thing.
7. configure quits with syntax errors (e.g. ./configure: line 697:
syntax error near unexpected token
AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE(libpbd,${LIBPBD_VERSION})')
in all lib directories (and ardour, for that matter) early in the
process. For whatever reason, all the new configure files appear to
be very broken, quitting before they can do any checks except
system type.
What am I missing here? This is the least successful yet I've been in
compiling this program. It's not that it won't compile, this time.
It's not even close to configuring. Are there some necessary files
missing from the CVS that people who've been keeping up with the
development already have on their machines? Does anyone have any
suggestions or is anyone willing to do a clean CVS download to
confirm that I'm not nuts?
Thanks,
Adam Zygmunt
azygmun_AT_bgnet.bgsu.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Jul 28 2001 - 20:55:28 EEST