$Id: HACKING,v 1.6 2002/10/07 21:58:40 massiot Exp $

Hacking vlc
===========

Requirements
------------

You will need the following tools if you plan to use the CVS version of vlc:

 - autoconf version 2.50 or later

 - automake version 1.5 (but 1.6 or later is recommended)

 - gettext version 0.10.40 (but 0.11.3 or later is recommended)

After retrieving the CVS tree, you need to run the bootstrap script to
generate all the files needed to build vlc. You can then run configure.

If you do not have the correct version of these tools, or if they are
simply not available for the operating system you plan to develop on,
you can check out a CVS tree on an OS that provides these tools (such
as a recent Linux distribution), run bootstrap, and then copy the whole
tree to your retarded OS.

There is a possibility that, at some point, automake might segfault. The
reason is unsufficient stack size, and can be easily fixed with the
`ulimit` command (or an equivalent) available in most shells. For instance
on bash 2.0, the following command solves the automake crash on Mac OS X :
ulimit -s 20000


The bootstrap sequence
----------------------

The bootstrap script does the following actions:

 - browse the modules/ directory for all available modules. A module "foo"
   exists if there is a Modules.am file in the modules/ directory which
   defines SOURCES_foo.

 - create a top-level Modules.am file (which will be included by Makefile.am)
   which contains additional build rules for modules, and includes all the
   Modules.am files that were found in modules/

 - create a top-level configure.ac file from configure.ac.in, generating
   the AC_SUBST and AM_CONDITIONAL rules that will be needed.

 - run autopoint (previously gettextize) to create an intl/ directory,
   needed when libgettext is not available.

 - run the usual aclocal, autoheader, automake and autoconf, which create
   the various Makefile.in files from the corresponding Makefile.am and the
   configure script from configure.ac.

 - fix a few files in the vlc repository that may have been altered.


How to add a module
-------------------

To add a module to the repository, just add its sources to a Modules.am
file. If you create a new Modules.am, do not forget to add a corresponding
line to modules/Makefile.am.

