Re: make distcheck

[Patrick Welche]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 08:01:59PM +0100, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > In a project, using autoconf 2.61, automake 1.10.1, libtool 1.5.26,
> > make distcheck succeeds. If I untar the created .tar.bz2 file, and
> > /path/to/untar/configure && make, I get errors - somehow the manual
> > "check build from buildir != srcdir" fails, but I thought distcheck
> > checked it automatically. (I must be missing something, but what?)
> 
> Hmm.  Maybe it fails due to absolute value for $(srcdir) (as computed
> by configure from the path to it)?  Please show the failure (cut and
> paste!).  The make implementation and version used is very interesting
> to know, too: VPATH issues are very make dependent.
> 
> There can also be bugs that don't show up with certain values of
> srcdir; ../configure is fairly common, and there have been suggestions
> before to change distcheck to try something different.
> 
> Oh, BTW, there's a 99% chance this issue is Automake specific rather
> than Autoconf.

The project was broken due to liberal use of #include "../../config.h".
configure will pop config.h in the builddir, so the source file will
never see ../../config.h.

I thought that running make distcheck in the source directory should
fail?

Ah! The first configure will create srcdir/config.h. Then, if you have
-I.. in CPPFLAGS things built in srcdir/_build may find srcdir/config.h ?

Need to look at that in the morning...

Cheers,

Patrick