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Hi, The autotools build will be added to xrootd CVS very soon (Peter and I will try to get it done this week). Please give me some feedback to the following, since this will have an impact on all developers. I propose to keep the old configure and GNUmakefiles at least for some time as second possibility until people get accustomed or until we have more experience from people using the new build (also, the autotools configure is slower, since it does more complicated testing of a system). So, we should move the old "configure" to something like configure.classic (in the repository, to keep the CVS history) or else the autotools generated configure will overwrite it every time, and by error you might check it in to CVS. The autotools configure will move all GNUmakefiles to GNUmakefile.classics, so that they do not interfere afterwards. The configure.classic will move any GNUmakefile.classic back to the old name. This way we can use both build flavours for now. My experience is that it is not a good idea to have the autotools produced files (Makefile.in configure aclocal.m4, etc.) in the CVS, because the files may come out with wrong time information and then autotools will want to recreate some of the derived files, just confusing people who do not know them. People who want to build from CVS will need autotools on their system and they will usually be developers, not normal users. The most usual way to build for normal users will be from a tarball. These tarballs can be easily produced by a developer by just typing "make dist" in the top directory and automake will automatically include all the required files (which includes naturally the configure script, Makefile.ins, etc.). Version information should be changed only in the configure.ac file. Then it is passed to all deriving files as either as a #define or as an autoconf replacement. Binary tarballs and RPMs are also easily produced, because the autotools created Makefiles respect "make install" and DESTDIR (for staging an RPM build) conventions. You will see by looking at the Makefile.ams, that they are fairly easy to write. For a nice conceptual overview with examples the autobook is still the best reference: http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook_toc.html Cheers, Derek -- Dr. Derek Feichtinger Tel: +41 22 767 10 07 LCG/ARDA Group email: [log in to unmask] CERN http://people.web.psi.ch/feichtinger CH-1211 Genève 23