I've taken a first crack (well, this is actually the second crack now) at getting ROOT to build using the usual GNU set of configuration tools - autoconf, libtool, and automake. This was mostly cut and paste work with the new ROOT makefiles augmented by a new Makefile template and an autoconf configuration script. Even though the point of using these tools is to handle differences between platforms transparently, some more work does need to be put into the Makefile templates before this can be realized in practice. For now, things build smoothly for me on Intel/Linux. Once nice side effect of the repackaging is that you no longer need a preexisting binary installation of ROOT in order to build ROOT from sources.
I've also talked with Steve Adler about his recent notes to roottalk about rpm'ing the ROOT distribution and I think the two things can be made to work very nicely together. For those compiling from scratch, the autoconf stuff helps deal with messy platform differences, and then for those installing a pre-built distribution having an rpm file available is extremely nice.
Anyway, I thought it might be useful to make available what I have so far. Download the root-2.21.tar.gz file (automatically made by automake, incidentally), `tar zxvf' it, and do something like:
mkdir root-2.21-build cd root-2.21-build ../root-2.21/configure --prefix=$HOME/install make make install
I also have a patch file that will create the additional files used by automake, libtool and autoconf. This patch stands a fair chance of being applicable to new ROOT source distributions. Just download it, uncompress it, download a ROOT source distribution, and do something like the following:
mkdir root-2.21 cd root-2.21 tar zxvf ../root_v2.21.source.tar.gz patch -p1 < ../root.patchThis patch file could probably be used directly with Steve's RPM work to produce a very convenient SRPM distribution.