[edit] Leveraging Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool for Inkscape
The GNU Autotools are a standard, powerful, and widely used way to ensure portability across a very diverse range of hardware. If you wish Inkscape to be portable to a variety of machines, then improving Autotool usage in Inkscape is key.
This page seeks to capture tricks, tips, advice, and directions to help people with barely a passing knowledge of these tools to learn enough that they can work towards infusing them into the codebase and customizing them for particular needs. It will also try to lay out the work in a step-by-step fashion so it's feasible for people to hop in as they have some spare cycles to help.
[edit] 0. Add use of config.h
config.h is where all the information collected by autoconf is made available to the program for use during compilation. So a first task is to add the header to all the .c files. Currently (11/12/03) of the 216 source code files, only 72 have the header.
#if HAVE_CONFIG_H # include <config.h> #endif /* HAVE_CONFIG_H */
#if HAVE_UNISTD_H # include <unistd.h> #endif /* HAVE_UNISTD_H */