	Developer notes for the SNF4SA developer distribution

			    30 April 2009

Scope
-----

This file contains information for software developers.  Ths
information includes the prerequisite software for building, and a
description of the build system.

Introduction
------------

The purpose of the build system is to create a user tarball.  The
files don't need to be compiled or linked, and the user is responsible
for intalling and removing the files.  Therefore, the build system
doesn't include any functionality for building, installing, or
uninstalling; the "make install" command does nothing.

See the section "Using the build system" for commands to initialize
the build system and create a user tarball.

Software prerequisites
----------------------

The build system uses GNU software development system.  The following
software is needed for building:

  1) automake

  2) autoconf

  3) make

  4) tar

These tools are normally available on a Linux system that is
configured as a software development system.  The Linux system
installation process usually gives the user a choice of installing a
workstation, server, or software development system.  However, not all
Linux distributions give these choices.

If these tools are not installed, they may be installed (or upgraded)
at any time.  The commands vary from distribution to distribution.
For Ubuntu, the apt-get command can be used:

  1) 'apt-get install automake'.

  2) 'apt-get install autoconf'.

  3) 'apt-get install make'.

  4) 'apt-get install tar'.

Structure of the build system
-----------------------------

The following files comprise the build system:

  1) configure.ac.  This is the main configuration file.  It specifies
  the distribution name, version, which libraries are needed, etc.

  2) Makefile.am.  This is used to create the top-level Makefile.  It
  lists which files and directories are part of the build system
  (e.g. snf4sa.cf), and which extra files are to be part of the
  distribution (e.g. README, etc).

To add an additional file , edit Makefile.am.  Add the file to the
appropriate variable (for example, to EXTRA_DIST).

Note that files that are not listed will not be included in the
distribution tarball.  This allows you to have additional files in
directories (used, for example, for other projects) without
unnecessarily increasing the size of the SNFServer application or
tarball.

Using the build system
----------------------

Issue the following command to prepare system newly checked out for
building:

  autoreconf --install

Then issue the following command for configuring the build system:

  ./configure

To create a user tarball:

  make dist

This creates a tarball with the name snf4sa-X.Y.Z.tar.gz.  X, Y, and Z, as well as "snf4sa" are specified by the following line in configure.ac:

  AC_INIT(snf4sa, X.Y.Z)

Other commands:

  "make maintainer-clean" removes many of the files that can be
  created.  After running this, you would need to run ./configure.

Note: The script 'cleanForDist' cleans the developer distribution.  It
removes any user tarballs that might have been created, files created
by 'autoreconf --install', and files ending in "~".  After running
this command, the directory tree can be imported into a version
control system, or tarred and gzipped.

Changing the version number or package name
-------------------------------------------

To change the version number or package name, edit configure.ac as
follows:

  Change the version number and/or package name for the build system.
  Do this by modifying the argument to the AC_INIT line in
  configure.ac.  For example, to change the package name to FOO and
  the version to 8.0.2, modify the line to be:

     AC_INIT(FOO, 8.0.2)
