Re: CVS checkout may not rerun autotools

[Noah Misch]

On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 09:25:53AM +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Noah Misch wrote on Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 11:18:16PM CEST:
> >
> > There's little harm in having Makefile.in older than Makefile.am if
> > the updated Makefile.in would not change.
> 
> True if you are a developer and have the right Autoconf and Automake
> versions installed; wrong if you are an innocent user that just found
> a buglet and, for the first time, adventures for a fix, and doesn't
> have those versions readily installed.  Yes, if no matching automake
> is found, then there'll only be warnings, no hard failure, but still
> inconvenient.

Reading the `automake-1.9 not found' warning seems harmless enough.  Even our
intrepid, innocent bug fix contributors can stomach that.

Paul's build failure does illustrate a limitation of Autoconf+Automake; I'll
post about that separately.

> If it disturbs Paul, I'd guess it could disturb others as well.
> I could undo that change, the effect would still be the intended
> one: have Makefile.in's with updated time stamps checked in.  :)

If you need to advance the time stamp of `Makefile.in' in CVS and have no need
to change its contents, use this approach: change `Makefile.in' trivially (add
white space to a comment), commit, revert your change, commit again.  Unlike
gratuitously changing `Makefile.am', this does not add chatter to the ChangeLog
or to the CVS history of any source file (the CVS history of Makefile.in is
inconsequential).