Re: 'make distcheck' fails due to Automake

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2004, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-04-21 at 04:35, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> > I am once again experiencing problems with Automake leaving behind the
> > distribution files it built so 'make distcheck' fails:
> >
> > ERROR: files left in build directory after distclean:
> > ./GraphicsMagick-1.2.020040419.tar.gz
> > ./GraphicsMagick-1.2.020040419.tar.bz2
> > ./GraphicsMagick-1.2.020040419.zip
> > gmake[1]: *** [distcleancheck] Error 1
> > gmake[1]: Leaving directory 
> > `/usr/home/bfriesen/build/GraphicsMagick-8-static/GraphicsMagick-1.2.020040418/_build'
> >
> > % automake --version
> > automake (GNU automake) 1.8.3
> >
> > This is under FreeBSD 5.X.
> >
> > What steps should I take to find the cause of this problem?
> I don't know what causes your problems, but note the versions used
> above: 020040419 vs. 020040418

Good catch.  For "snapshot" builds, my project does not hard-code the
version in the configure.ac file.  Instead it uses a scrap of shell
code to compute the version (at configure time) based on the last
ChangeLog entry.  In fact, all of the package versioning is controlled
from a separate file since it doesn't make sense to me to modify
configure.ac just to set the package version.  This has eased
maintenance considerably.

If Automake uses the timestamp of configure.ac but doesn't compare the
package version, then it seems that the build environment can get
confused.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen