When you are ready to produce a tarball for distribution, there are a few steps to follow:
-
Check out a clean copy of nALFS from the SVN repository. Using an existing copy, especially one that has been configured and used as a build tree, can potentially cause errors in the make dist process.
-
Edit bootstrap.configure, and modify the line starting with AC_INIT to reflect the version number that you want the distribution to be given (replace "SVN" with your desired version number). Do not commit this change to the SVN repository, as the SVN version should always report its version number as "SVN".
-
Run aclocal to ensure that your aclocal.m4 file is up to date.
-
Run sh ./bootstrap with some parameters (to be explained). This command will create the configure script and Makefile (as is normally done with a SVN checkout), but will also download, extract and rename the documentation files that will be included in the tarball. These files include the DTD, the syntax document describing the DTD, the user's guide and the hacker's guide. The latter three documents are currently downloaded from the ALFS/downloads ares on the LFS server. See the URL_BASE variable in the bootstrap script to change the download source.
The bootstrap shell script supports multiple parameters. The -d parameter will download the version of the nALFS DTD specified. To get the SVN trunk use -d trunk. The -s parameter will download the version of the ALFS DTD Syntax Doc specified. To get the SVN trunk use -s SVN. To get a named version (e.g. v3.1) use -s 3.1. The -u and -h parameters will download the version of the nALFS User's Guide and Hacker's Guide respectively. They work just like the -s parameter does. The -p will download the version of the official LFS stable profile specified. It works like the -d parameter.
A good example for reference: sh ./bootstrap -d trunk -s SVN -u SVN -h SVN -p 5.1.1-5
![[Note]](../../images/note.png)
|
Note |
|---|---|
|
If you want to add more than one profile version to the distribution tarball, you can rerun bootstrap many times with just the -p parameter. |
|
-
Run ./configure specifying any parameters your system needs to complete the configuration process.
-
Run make dist. This will produce both a .tar.gz and a .tar.bz2 file in the current directory containing everything that should be needed to build nALFS on an end-user's system. Note that this tarball will be created using the autoconf, automake and libtool versions on your development system, so please make sure they are current releases before creating a tarball for public consumption.
-
Run make distcheck. If your system requires any special parameters to be given to configure for it to complete (like --with-libxml2, for example), then you can use make DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS="..." distcheck to supply those parameters. The distcheck process will actually unpack the tarball into a temporary directory, and run a complete configure/make/install/uninstall process on it to ensure that no build errors occur. This step should be considered to be mandatory before releasing your tarball to the general public.