The new infra - a technical overview

Main components: autotools, giella-core and templates.

Autotools

All languages are independent “projects/products”

Building languages

Building is done (e.g. for sme) in the $GTHOME/langs/sme folder, with:

./autogen.sh -l
./configure
make
sudo make install

(Note that the ./configure command may take different parameters, see directly below.)

The same commands are used for all languages in the different langs/ dir, if one wants to build and install more languages (note that there is a script makeall.sh to compile all languages). (See also the overview of the subdirectories in each language directory.)

As mentioned, the command ./configure is used to set up different options for compilation. In order to see all the available options, write:

./configure --help

In order to see what installation you have set just now, write:

head config.log

The answer will read Invocation command line was, and thereafter the ./configure command, with the current settings displayed. A situation where make will build fsts for dictionaries, but otherwise just give the default values, will show as follows:

  ./configure --enable-dicts

Default options may be turned off with disable, e.g. by writing: ./configure --disable-generators

or, to turn off the –with options, write –without, and then what you do not want:

 ./configure --without-xfst

Several options may be stacked after each other, in any order.

Note about the build and configure directories

<lang>/am-shared/ ## shared build instructions - the real build stuff
       m4/        ## configuration macros

NEVER TOUCH THESE DIRECTORIES AND FILES!!!

These files (and directories) are always updated by merging in changes from the templates (see below). Such changes should only be done by the infrastructure maintainers.

Gtcore

$GTHOME/giella-core/ - contains core:

• scripts
• xsl files
• common filters - sub filter, morpheme boundary mark filter, etc.
• templates (see below)

Templates

Two templates defined so far (6.11.2012):

• und - the full basic infrastructure for all languages
• smi - contains lexicon(s) and features specific to the sami languages

The infrastructure of all languages are updated by merging in changes in the templates. Only languages with a corresonding .timestamp file will be merged.

Template updates MUST be coordinated - the merging is relatively fragile, and at the same time modifies many files.

Testing

There’s a separate test/ dir that contains a mirror hierarchy to the other dirs, and which contains a couple of test shell script. The basic requirements for the test scripts are:

• they must be executable
• the must return with an exit value of zero for success
• any other value indicates a failed test
• the exit value 77 indicates a test that was skipped (neither fail nor pass)
• the exit value 99 indicates a hard fail (ie a real crash of the tested process)
• the test scripts must be listed in a TESTS variable in one of the Makefile.am files

As long as these requirements are met, the test scripts can be written in any language - even C!