For rebuilding from source, here are some guidelines to follow. For developers who may be adding functionality to the program, be sure to read the last section of this documen: "FINAL WORDS". SUPER-SHORT VERSION: You should be able to just run "./configure && make". But if you make any significant changes or experience any problems, you may wish to run "./autogen.sh && make" to regenerate everything. This will call aclocal if necessary, then automake, which creates Makefile.in from Makefile.am rules. Then it calls autoconf, which will generate configure from configure.in and the Makefile.{am,in} sources. Finally, autogen calls configure to generate the final files necessary for building gramps. SHORT VERSION: Execute: aclocal automake --add-missing --gnu && autoconf && make MORE INFO: Version and package info is now set in configure.in through a call to the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro. The results are stored in variables PACKAGE and VERSION, which then get substituted wherever necessary. (gramps.sh, gramps.spec, src/const.py, asst. Makefiles, etc.) We also manually set the RELEASE variable for setting things like "pre" or minor bugfix issues. * Note: Using @VERSION@ in the manuals has the advantage that the current manual always states that it describes current version of gramps. The disadvantage is that this becomes misleading if the manual isn't regularly updated. Keep in mind this is GRAMPS version and not *manual* version. Another problem is that the standard GNOME SGML documentation make rules (sgmldocs.make) have their own rule, but automake generates its own rule and this introduces a conflict. "make (un)install" now runs scrollkeeper-update to ensure documentation database is up to date. Scrollkeeper v. > 0.3 is required to properly register documentation. VERBOSE, UGLY DETAILS FOR DEVELOPERS: Using automake/autoconf adds many, MANY build targets to the makefiles. Basically, we only care about the main and "install" targets. However, there are some others that bear further notice: * make dist -- will create a lovely gramps-{VERSION}.tar.gz archive with everything needed to distribute, including the HTML documentation just in case Joe User doen't know about or have a compatable jw/db2html. After running "make dist" you can create the rpms using "rpm -ta gramps-{VERSION}.tar.gz". How nice is that? * make clean -- only gets rid of byte-compiled stuff like .so files. * make distclean -- improves on clean by eliminating configuration (*.in, config.*, Makefiles, and converted documentation.) stuff. This is generally what you (as a developer) will want for testing "fresh" compiles. * make trans -- We add this one on our own for building the template.po file. Another caveat of the automake mantra is that new/overriding make targets/rules/defines should generally go in the Makefile.am files rather than Makefile.in. * Note: Another beauty of the automake mechanism (and having automake macros in the configure script) is that once the scripts have been made, a change to any .am file will trigger "make" to regenerate the Makefile.in/configure scripts as appropriate. It is _very_ convenient. FINAL WORDS: automake "thinks" of a distribution in terms of "SOURCES", such as raw C code, "COMPILED OBJECTS" like executables and libraries, and "DATA", such as images, scripts, and documentation. Thus, for gramps we concentrate on DATA-type objects. We must tell automake what objects are important. We do this by adding to the EXTRA_DIST variable in the various Makefile.am files before running automake.