[tlbuild] Build failure in libs/icu/

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Mon, 12 Oct 2009, Vladimir Volovich wrote:

>> my guess would be
>>
>> -       echo "${srcdir}/configure" | sed 's,icu/dummy/,icu/icu-xetex/,' >$@
>> +       echo "${top_srcdir}/configure" | sed 's,icu/dummy/,icu/icu-xetex/,' >$@
>
>> though i did not test.
>
> oops, i've meant
>
> -       echo "${srcdir}/configure" | sed 's,icu/dummy/,icu/icu-xetex/,' >$@
> +       echo "${abs_srcdir}/configure" | sed 's,icu/dummy/,icu/icu-xetex/,' >$@

Hi Vladimir,

yes, that might be a better possibility. I'll look into this for TL2010.

The whole thing is somewhat hackish and caused by some unfortunate
properties of the ICU build system (from both icu4c-4_2_1-src.tgz and
libs/icu/icu-xetex/ in the TL tree):

There are targets distclean and dist but distclean doesn't clean everything,
dist effectively does nothing, and the distdir target is missing.  Thus
building icu-xetex in the source directory causes all sorts of difficulties
for 'make dist' and 'make distcheck'.  Consequently I decided to distribute
the whole icu-xetex source tree SRC/libs/icu/icu-xetex but build in
BLD/libs/icu/icu-build, even when SRC=BLD.

The only purpose of icu/dummy is to let configure handle the complictions of
adjusting (absolute or relative) values for srcdir, cache-file, etc.  when
configuring a subdirectory.

Maybe there is a better way to do all this.

Regards
Peter