Re: Bootstrapping from cvs

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Tom,

| Today I updated autoconf from cvs for the first time in a long while.
| A simple `configure; make' didn't work.  It tries repeatedly to run
| autoconf, automake, etc.

Why?

| I suggest we use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.  I know this is not always
| popular, but I think autoconf is a special case.  It is one of the few
| tools that has this bootstrapping problem.

Really, I'm against it.

| The current failure (after touching configure and "cvsdiscard"ing the
| incorrectly rebuild Makefile.in's) looks like this:
| 
| make[1]: Entering directory `/home/tromey/gnu/Auto/autoconf/build/bin'
| ../tests/autom4te --language M4sh ../../autoconf/bin/autoconf.as -o 
../../autoconf/bin/autoconf.in
| autom4te: cannot open /home/tromey/gnu/Auto/autoconf/build/lib/autom4te.cfg: 
No such file or directory
|  at /home/tromey/gnu/Auto/autoconf/build/bin/autom4te line 428
| 
| (I don't know what this one means, unfortunately -- I've been out of
| the loop too long!)

Recently some changes were introduced in the build process, changes I
have not tracked down completely.  Up to now, we never faced the
problem you exposed, so I would like to know more.

Anyway, running tests/autoreconf (yes, tests/) should make it.