Entirely modular and dependancy hell cometh!!!
GNU Build is a series of tools (GCC) which are used to generate a customized build environment based on the platofm/system your running.
Because everything is open source, when you download a tarball, and you run it's GNU ./configure script it's actually preparing the makefile and others to build for you architecture (x86, PowerPC, Mac, Solarism, etc). Is this correct? So for a self purpose application I could avoid using autoconf, etc and just build a makefile manually, knowing that I will likely never need it to compile on Solaris, etc...but in the spirit of open source we use the GNU compiler collection (GCC) suite of tools to automate the process as much as possible???
Most if not all GNU based applications will have the same:
setup build environment, make the application binaries and install them appropriately type instructions, correct?./configure
make
make install
When you download the tarball for say, gEdit and you extract and attempt to build, the tarball package will not likely contain any of it's dependancies (gtk+ libs, etc) so you are expected to know this (as a developer) and download them prior to running a build like above...
Again, under windows, it's either very explicitly noted which libs, etc you need to install (Windows SDK's usually) or the dependancies are included with the package so there is no dependancy hell as i've expeirenced, but knowing this, if I am correct will make things a little easier now, knowing at least I have to research what is needed before building anything. PITA but what do you do?
Basically, inorder for my future to prosper under Linux I should brush up on the GNU tools (autoconf, automake, etc???)
These are what is typically refered to as GCC (GNU compiler collection?)
gcc is a front end to it's language specific compilers (C, C++, Ada, Java, Pascal, whatever)
Why is it then when I use gcc on a C++ source file it causes errors, but g++ works fine? Doesn't GCC assume that C++ source files are likely C++ and not C which is what is causing the error.
Not much more to ask, I should try and find a specialized forum for such questions, but thanks for any heads up...
Cheers