Re: maintainer mode (Was: Re: first time automaking question)

[Chadwick A. McHenry]

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> >>> "Chadwick" == Chadwick A McHenry <address@hidden> writes:
>  Chadwick> Using AM_MAINTAINER_MODE seems to be a Good Thing, in
>  Chadwick> light of the potential problems for users, when it is
>  Chadwick> absent. Is there any reason I _would_not_ want to
>  Chadwick> include it in my configure.am and modify my bootstrap
>  Chadwick> script to specify '--enable-maintainer-mode'?
>
> What are the problems you want to hide with AM_MAINTAINER_MODE?
> Maybe we can help you to fix them.
>

>From the original thread (below) I get the impression that if automake and
friends are on the users machine, and are not the same version as used by
me (the developer), there could be 'trouble' due to ./configure testing
for auto*. I also read that these potentail problems are eliminated by
adding AM_MAINTAINER_MODE. I haven't personally run this, but it seems
like a good idea to eliminate the potential for any difficulty.

On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Steve M. Robbins wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 02:15:24PM -0500, Sean Finney wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 09:34:48AM +0200, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> > > >>> "Sean" == Sean Finney <address@hidden> writes:
> > >  Sean> - ./configure now tests for auto* and makeinfo
> > >
> > >  Sean> is that really necessary?
> > >
> > > Yes.  Automake create Makefiles that know how to rerun the auto*
> > > tools when necessary.  So configure check for them.
> >
> > does this introduce any problems if the target machine doesn't
> > have (or has ancient versions of) auto*?  or, if the auto* isn't
> > found, does it just not implement said functionality?
>
> Yes and no.  You can run into trouble if the target machine has a
> different version (older OR newer!) of autoconf or automake.  Mostly
> this is due to a badly-written macro which is, sadly, rather common.
> ...
>
> You can completely disable these "maintainer rules" in the
> *distributed* makefiles via the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro.  Look it up
> in the automake docs.
>




--
Chad McHenry          Email:     address@hidden
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