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Re: Automake violations of the gnu coding conventions


From: Brian Dessent
Subject: Re: Automake violations of the gnu coding conventions
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 20:40:16 -0700

"K. Richard Pixley" wrote:

> 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.

I think you're generalizing this to a degree that's not the case.

Most users that build from source do so from a tarball, and since tar
preserves timestamps they should be correct and the user won't need
developer tools regardless.

Many, if not all, of the GNU packages that do store generated files in
version already use this option and thus don't require any developer
tools.  Examples: gcc, binutils, gdb/insight, and the entire sourceware
tree.

The remaining GNU packages that don't store generated files in version
control by definition require developer tools to build from CVS, so the
option is irrelevent here as well, since again a tarball has the
required timestamps.  Examples: libtool, m4, coreutils.

When you eliminate all of the above you're down to a very limited
portion of use cases, and if installing developer tools is not an option
then the problem can be solved by simply using a tarball, using cp -p,
find | xargs touch, etc.

> 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.

--disable-maintainer-mode ought to work, but I haven't tried it.

Brian




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