[Gretl-devel] revision of build process for gretl addons

Here's a heads-up for those building gretl from source: in git master there's a change in the build setup for the "addons" function packages. The need-to-know message is just this: To ensure a correct build with current git you should delete the "addons" subdirectory under your build tree (NOT the source tree!), rerun gretl's configure script, then build as usual. (Blowing away build/addons is a one-time thing: no need to repeat it unless there's a comparable change in future.) For anyone who wants to know more: with gretl 2024a we set up tight integration of the addons into gretl releases. That involved scrapping the old, individual version numbers of the addons and substituting the current gretl version for all of them. To automate this we renamed the ".spec" file for each of the addons (which specifies the package version among other things) as <addon>.spec.in and arranged for the configure script to read this source file and write out <addon>.spec in the build tree, substituting the current gretl version for the dummy string "@VERSION@" in the spec.in file. This worked OK up to a point, but a downside became apparent. Any changes to the source file <addon>.spec.in would propagate to <addon>.spec, and thence to the addon itself, ONLY if the configure script is rerun. And that's confusing, since one generally expects that revisions to a source file (as opposed to the addition of new source files) will propagate directly via "make", without it being necessary to reconfigure. So the new change in git renames <addon>.spec.in as <addon>.spec, and instead of relying on configure to cash out "@VERSION@" with the current gretl version, the "makepkg" command takes care of that job. The reason why you should delete build/addons, one time, is that this tree will contain what are now stale generated <addon>.spec files. Under the new scheme there's no generated .spec file in the build tree, just a symlink to <addon>.spec in the source tree. Allin