Run configure in gyp file

Question

Suppose I have a node module which is essentially a wrapper around some standard C library using autotools. So the library by itself would be installed using ./configure and make and perhaps make install. The wrapper code is just a few files, and can be handled by gyp. But how can I handle the dependency? How can I instruct gyp that I want to build the autotooled library before I compile my code? Or is that not possible because autotools can't be expected to run on Windows? If I can't run configure, is there some gyp way to do similar things, in particular to detect which functions are availabel and which are not?

Answer 1

With gyp actions and 'target_type': none it might look like this:

   {
        'target_name': 'FTGL',
        'type': 'none',
        'dependencies': ['FreeType'],
        'actions': [
            {
                'action_name': 'build_ftgl',
                'message': 'Building FTGL...',
                'inputs': ['ftgl/src/FTGL/ftgl.h'],
                'outputs': ['ftgl/src/.libs/libftgl.a'],
                'action': ['eval', 'cd ftgl && ./configure --with-pic && make -C src'],
            },
        ],
  }

Note: using eval in the action allows to run multiple commands