Re: configure/makefile cleanup

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Eric Blake wrote on Sat, Apr 05, 2008 at 03:16:54PM CEST:
>
> I'm considering applying something along the lines of this patch.  The
> only reason against doing so is that I am now relying on automake's html
> target, which is only available from automake 1.10 or newer, whereas
> autoconf could previously be bootstrapped from automake 1.7.9 (or at least
> that was the claim in configure.ac; although I've only tested
> bootstrapping autoconf with automake 1.9.6).

Which also means Autoconf 2.60 is needed for bootstrapping Autoconf
(since Automake 1.10 requires that).  Ugh.  OK if you think that's
ok, but that probably warrants documenting, too.

> The patch thus impacts the
> minimum requirements for bootstrapping from git, but should not affect the
> requirements for installing the resulting tarball.

Yep.

> One further question - if applied, this patch is already requiring
> automake 1.10; should we also go one step further, require automake
> 1.10.1, and use dist-lzma in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE?  Note that if I don't use
> dist-lzma, I will still manually create a .tar.lzma for distribution on
> ftp.gnu.org.

I don't see the advantage of having dist-lzma in AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE.
All it does is error out if you don't have lzma, and avoid you the
second command of
  make dist ; make dist-lzma

which you can do even by using, but not requiring 1.10.1: the dist-lzma
rule is generated in any case, it's just that lzma is not invoked from
the plain dist rule.

Cheers,
Ralf