Will the use of autoconf help with the problems of paths and MacOS variations? it should do, but maybe I am misunderstanding.
Probably not - the problem is not the compilation, but the environment variables settings. When you want to run some UNIX program on Mac OS X, you must run shell first (sometimes it's done by system) and you never know, which shell with which environment setup will be run.
I've lost track of the state of the autoconfing excercise as I was away - is it now part of the standard therion package and build process or is more work still needed?
Not until now. There are several reasons: 1. TIME - I'm missing it at all. 2. We need to clean up the mess with file structure first, but we didn't agreed until now on the new structure. 3. After fixing all warnings with GCC 3, compilation works quite fine on all systems (Win, Linux, Mac OS).
I expect to get back on the case and package the latest Therion release in the next couple of weeks and finally upload to Debian. Expect mails accordingly :-)
OK, I have now some very urgent bugs fixing on TODO list. Than we have to solve the therion homepage problems (until now we've paid nothing, now we're forced to). Than we will see ... Regards, S.