Starting with GNU automake 1.12, the "de-ANSI-fication support" has been
removed, which ngIRCd used to enable building itself on very old systems.
Now the problem is, that using automake >= 1.12 isn't working because of
the now unsupported M4 macros. Therefore the solution that this patch
implements is to dynamically generate the automake input files with our
own ./autogen.sh script:
configure.ng => configure.in
Makefile.ng => Makefile.am
This is quite an ugly approach, but it works and enables us to:
1. use current automake >= 1.12 for development and "private builds",
2. still build distribution archives using automake 1.11.x that have
"de-ANSI-fication support" enabled in the generated Makefile's.
And if you are using Makefile's generated with a automake version newer
than 1.11.x (without "de-ANSI-fication support"), the ./configure script
warns you not to use this generated build system to generate distribution
archives.
Drawback of this patch: you MUST use our autogen.sh script, you can't call
the autoconf/automake commands directly any more; but autoreconf should
still work ...
Now the ngIRCd release/version number is deduced from the "current"
annotated GIT tag; see "git describe --help" for details. This is the
same scheme the Linux kernel uses and gives much more details version
numbers for interim releases and inofficial source archives generated
using "make dist".
Please note: the version number is only updated it the autogen.sh
script is run; so after pulling in and pushing out new commits, you
should run ./autogen.sh!
On some systems (for example Gentoo Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD), these
variables are used to select which version of GNU automake and autoconf
to use, but we shouldn't depend on a specific version -- instead we
should use the "system default". So probably it is up to the user to
set these variables accordingly to set up some wrapper scripts of his
operating system distribution.
Alexander Barton