GSoC07: first milestone reached (libabiword diet)

Hi,

after some hacking I'm happy to announce first results. Over the last
days I've been working on `libabiword-builder' [1], a buildsystem-only
module that I'll be using to create various libabiword incarnations
from the abiword source tree. The rationale for that approach is that
abiword's buildsystem has become somewhat convoluted over the years,
and using a separate module I'm avoiding a branch, at least for now.

So the first milestone I set myself is building the libabiword we're
supporting for some time using the new builder, and this works now.
Interestingly the (stripped) libtool created .so is smaller than the
hand-crafted one, namely:
8957248 abiword-build/src/wp/main/unix/libabiword-2.5.so
7208488 libabiword-build/src/.libs/libabiword-2.5.so
stripped abiword binary for reference:
6805020 abiword-build/src/wp/main/unix/abiword

The only thing missing is installation of the .strings file, after
that we should move our libabiword consumers to use the builder and
remove the hacks from abi's build system.

How to build it yourself:
(1) Checkout the svn module to an abiword peer directory.
(2) Run ./link-sources.sh in the builder's toplevel dir, that'll
symlink the sources into the builder's tree.
(3) Autogen/configure as usual. Note that none of abiword's build
options is supported yet and you unconditionally need enchant and
goffice (this will change).
(4) If all goes well you'll get a binary called `abiword-dynamic' and
libabiword-2.5.so in src/

Future tasks include fixing `make distcheck', so we can ship a
libabiword tarball.

[1] http://svn.abisource.com/libabiword-builder/

Cheers,
Rob
Received on Wed May 9 11:43:42 2007