===================== 1. Copyright & Licensing ===================== autogen.sh is Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 AbiSource, Inc. and is licensed under the GNU GPL (see COPYING). See individual plugins for copyright and licensing. GNU GPL should be assumed unless explicitly stated otherwise. ============================== 2. Configuring in abiword-plugins ============================== './configure --help' lists a number of options, others may be available. Try also running 'configure --help' in individual plugin directories. Most importantly, plugins can be enabled/disabled via configure options. configure --help will list these options. Recommended practice is to set the default to disabled all using --disable-all option, and to enable specific plugins. For example, to build only the HTML importer you would do: ./configure --disable-all --enable-html [--with-libxml2=/opt/libxml2-2.4.13] AbiWord's "make distribution" RPM target builds a number of plugins by default. See the BUILD.TXT in the abi directory for instructions on changing which plugins are built. The AbiWord sources are required for most plugins, and abiword-plugins/configure requires them. It searches for a peer directory called 'abi' and (if found) assumes it to be the AbiWord sources. Otherwise, or to override this selection, use the --with-AbiWord= option to configure to specify the real location (dir) of the AbiWord sources. An installation directory is required as well. If 'AbiWord' is in the PATH, abiword-plugins/configure scans it for ABISUITE_HOME and sets $ABISUITE_HOME/plugins as the plugin installation directory. Otherwise, or to override this selection, use the --prefix= option to configure to install plugins in /plugins. =========================== 3. The autogen.sh Build System =========================== ----------------- Developer's notes ----------------- The recommended build method for UNIX et al. is to use the GNU development utilities autoconf, automake and libtool, since building modules is tricky business and nothing does it better (i.e., more portably) than libtool - which is not to say that libtool is without problems, since even CVS libtool has problems with darwin (most of them zsh-related) and no doubt there are issues on some other operating systems... abiword-plugins/autogen.sh is a script which (a) detects plugins, and (b) creates the umbrella build system. This makes it easy to add new plugins. a. Plugin Detection Any subdirectory of abiword-plugins which contains a file called 'plugin.cfg' is treated as a plugin source directory. This file sets a number of variables that influence the behaviours of both abiword-plugins/autogen.sh and abiword-plugins/configure: abi_plugin_autoconf=[yes|no] # Whether the plugin uses autoconf abi_plugin_configure=[yes|no] # Whether the plugin has a configure script abi_plugin_script=[