Hello I refer to this macro: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/automake/Vala-Support.html
The AM_PROG_VALAC macro checks for the required version of the vala compiler. "... Any .vala file listed in a _SOURCES variable will be compiled into C code by the Vala compiler. The generated .c files are distributed. The end user does not need to have a Vala compiler installed." I have a problem with the distributed tarballs of my program. Consider the following example: I use this in my configure.ac: VALA_REQUIRED=0.9.8 AM_PROG_VALAC($VALA_REQUIRED) I do my program for vala-0.9.8 and I do a 'make dist' -> c files are distributed with the tarball. On the targeted users machine there is vala-0.9.7, the user does './configure' and is getting: $ ./configure checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c checking whether build environment is sane... yes checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /bin/mkdir -p checking for gawk... gawk checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles... no checking for valac... /usr/local/bin/valac checking /usr/local/bin/valac is at least version 0.9.8... no configure: error: Vala 0.9.8 not found. But the user should be able to build the program. vala is not necessary to have on his machine at all. I tried to check for the vala pkg-config data but this failed on a ubuntu distribution where there is the vala compiler but not the *-dev package with the *.pc file. So I cannot workaround here. In the distributed package, the installed version of vala shouldn't matter, because the vala compiler is not needed at all (it also shouldn't be used at all). It's not easy to understand that if you have an old version of vala, the build of the package will fail and if you uninstall the old vala version it will work. I'm not an autotools expert but I am willing to help fix this but I will need further instructions. automake is version 1.11.1 Regards Jörn
