Overview » Developing with autosetup » System-wide Install

Using a system-wide autosetup

Introduction

As explained in Developing with autosetup, one deployment option for autosetup since version 0.6.7 is to use a system-wide install.

This guide explains how to install and use such a system-wide installation.

System Install

A system-wide install can only be done from a development tree, not a locally installed or previous system-wide installation, so first you will need to Download autosetup.

$ git clone git://github.com/msteveb/autosetup.git
...
$ cd autosetup

Now do a system-wide install to a location expected to be in the PATH.

$ ./autosetup --sysinstall=/usr/local
Installed system autosetup v0.6.7 to /usr/local/bin/autosetup

Note that autosetup, along with some companion scripts, is installed to the bin directory underneath the given target directory. This is the directory that should be in the PATH.

$ /bin/ls -1 /usr/local/bin/autosetup*
/usr/local/bin/autosetup
/usr/local/bin/autosetup-config.guess
/usr/local/bin/autosetup-config.sub
/usr/local/bin/autosetup-find-tclsh
/usr/local/bin/autosetup-test-tclsh

Project Install

Once autosetup is installed, a project install may be performed. For example, here is the installation to a new project.

$ mkdir myproject
$ cd myproject
$ autosetup --install
autosetup v0.6.7 creating configure to use system-installed autosetup
I don't see configure, so I will create it.
Creating autosetup/README.autosetup
$ find . -type f
./autosetup/README.autosetup
./configure

As we can see, autosetup has created only two files. The configure wrapper script simply redirects to autosetup, which must be in the PATH

The directory autosetup/ contains the file README.autosetup. This directory can be used to install local modules, just like a full project install of autosetup.

Project Initialisation

Now the project can be configured in the usual way.

$ ./configure --init=make
Initialising make: Simple "make" build system

I don't see auto.def, so I will create it.
Note: I don't see Makefile.in. You will probably need to create one.

See Developing with autosetup for further details.

Considerations for a System-Wide Install

Using a system-wide install brings some specific considerations.

Preinstalled Jim or Tcl Required

Either jimsh (Jim Tcl) or tclsh (Tcl 8.5 or 8.6) must be available in the path. This is a reasonable requirement in that Jim Tcl and Tcl are easily installable on systems supported by autosetup.

Compatible autosetup Version

The biggest potential problem is if multiple projects on the same system require different versions of autosetup. As autosetup continues to evolve, this is certainly possible, and is a downside of this approach.

It is strongly recommended that the new autosetup-require-version command is used to ensure that an older version of autosetup is not used.

# This will given an error if the current autosetup version is < 0.6.7
autosetup-require-version 0.6.7

use cc

# Add any user options here
options {
}
...

autosetup is not installed by version (e.g. autosetup0.6.7) to avoid a proliferation of multiple slightly different versions. However if necessary, autosetup can be renamed and the configure wrapper updated accordingly.

$ cat configure
#!/bin/sh
# Explicitly use the renamed autosetup0.6.7
WRAPPER="-"; "autosetup0.6.7" "$@"

autosetup