Re: Automake violations of the gnu coding conventions

[K. Richard Pixley]

Robert Collins wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 17:27 -0700, K. Richard Pixley wrote:
>   
> > My question today is... is there any hope of bringing automake
> > generated 
> > Makefiles back into line with the GNU coding standards so that these 
> > applications will work once again? 
> >     
>
> Use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE in your package; this will disable the rules to
> rebuild Makefile.in etc unless --enable-maintainer-mode is supplied by
> the user.
Seems to me that this should be the default.  Only a maintainer should 
even be interested in regenerationg Makefile.in's automagically.  As is, 
typical builders, (ie, not maintainers), are required to install 
automake in order to build packages requiring automake.

AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is good to know about, thank you.  But it doesn't 
really solve the problem for users.  Now if generated makefiles could 
have those rules turned off using a command line and/or environment 
variable, that might be useful.  Then we could build packages without 
automake, so long as we had AM_MAINTAINER_MODE=no in our environment.  
But again, I'd argue that it was the maintainers who should set the 
variable and that the default should be no dependency on automake.

Of course, you can't do the conditional thing easily without resorting 
to GNU make extensions, so we'd likely lose the ability to build with a 
v7 make program.

--rich