Nicholas Nethercote b05a2a18d7 This commit merges the BUILD_TWEAKS branch onto the trunk. It has the
following improvements:

- Arch/OS/platform-specific files are now included/excluded via the
  preprocessor, rather than via the build system.  This is more consistent
  (we use the pre-processor for small arch/OS/platform-specific chunks
  within files) and makes the build system much simpler, as the sources for
  all programs are the same on all platforms.

- Vast amounts of cut+paste Makefile.am code has been factored out.  If a
  new platform is implemented, you need to add 11 extra Makefile.am lines.
  Previously it was over 100 lines.

- Vex has been autotoolised.  Dependency checking now works in Vex (no more
  incomplete builds).  Parallel builds now also work.  --with-vex no longer
  works;  it's little use and a pain to support.  VEX/Makefile is still in
  the Vex repository and gets overwritten at configure-time;  it should
  probably be renamed Makefile-gcc to avoid possible problems, such as
  accidentally committing a generated Makefile.  There's a bunch of hacky
  copying to deal with the fact that autotools don't handle same-named files
  in different directories.  Julian plans to rename the files to avoid this
  problem.

- Various small Makefile.am things have been made more standard automake
  style, eg. the use of pkginclude/pkglib prefixes instead of rolling our
  own.

- The existing five top-level Makefile.am include files have been
  consolidated into three.

- Most Makefile.am files now are structured more clearly, with comment
  headers separating sections, declarations relating to the same things next
  to each other, better spacing and layout, etc.

- Removed the unused exp-ptrcheck/tests/x86 directory.

- Renamed some XML files.

- Factored out some duplicated dSYM handling code.

- Split auxprogs/ into auxprogs/ and mpi/, which allowed the resulting
  Makefile.am files to be much more standard.

- Cleaned up m_coredump by merging a bunch of files that had been
  overzealously separated.

The net result is 630 fewer lines of Makefile.am code, or 897 if you exclude
the added Makefile.vex.am, or 997 once the hacky file copying for Vex is
removed.  And the build system is much simpler.


git-svn-id: svn://svn.valgrind.org/valgrind/trunk@10364
2009-06-24 00:37:09 +00:00

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Release notes for Valgrind
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you are building a binary package of Valgrind for distribution,
please read README_PACKAGERS. It contains some important information.
If you are developing Valgrind, please read README_DEVELOPERS. It contains
some useful information.
For instructions on how to build/install, see the end of this file.
If you have problems, consult the FAQ to see if there are workarounds.
Executive Summary
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Valgrind is an award-winning instrumentation framework for building
dynamic analysis tools. There are Valgrind tools that can automatically
detect many memory management and threading bugs, and profile your
programs in detail. You can also use Valgrind to build new tools.
The Valgrind distribution currently includes six production-quality
tools: a memory error detector, two thread error detectors, a cache and
branch-prediction profiler, a call-graph generating cache profiler, and
a heap profiler. It also includes one experimental tool, which detects
out of bounds reads and writes of stack, global and heap arrays.
Valgrind is closely tied to details of the CPU, operating system and to
a lesser extent, compiler and basic C libraries. This makes it difficult
to make it portable. Nonetheless, it is available for the following
platforms:
- x86/Linux
- AMD64/Linux
- PPC32/Linux
- PPC64/Linux
- x86/MacOSX
- AMD64/MacOSX
Note that AMD64 is just another name for x86-64, and Valgrind runs fine
on Intel processors. Also note that the core of MacOSX is called
"Darwin" and this name is used sometimes.
Valgrind is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.
Read the file COPYING in the source distribution for details.
Documentation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A comprehensive user guide is supplied. Point your browser at
$PREFIX/share/doc/valgrind/manual.html, where $PREFIX is whatever you
specified with --prefix= when building.
Building and installing it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To install from the Subversion repository :
0. Check out the code from SVN, following the instructions at
http://www.valgrind.org/downloads/repository.html.
1. cd into the source directory.
2. Run ./autogen.sh to setup the environment (you need the standard
autoconf tools to do so).
3. Continue with the following instructions...
To install from a tar.bz2 distribution:
4. Run ./configure, with some options if you wish. The standard
options are documented in the INSTALL file. The only interesting
one is the usual --prefix=/where/you/want/it/installed.
5. Run "make".
6. Run "make install", possibly as root if the destination permissions
require that.
7. See if it works. Try "valgrind ls -l". Either this works, or it
bombs out with some complaint. In that case, please let us know
(see www.valgrind.org).
Important! Do not move the valgrind installation into a place
different from that specified by --prefix at build time. This will
cause things to break in subtle ways, mostly when Valgrind handles
fork/exec calls.
The Valgrind Developers