Re: GNUmakefile: git-version-gen, maintainer-check, install

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Eric,

* Eric Blake wrote on Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 04:38:00PM CEST:
> Denny Joel E <jdenny <at> cs.clemson.edu> writes:
> 
> > > Well, I tried to make it a hard error, so that it would be the only
> > > output, but others on the list convinced me to reduce it back to a
> > > warning.  I don't know of any GNU make construct to make it appear last.
> > > Maybe we just insert a sleep 10 after printing the warning, so that the
> > > interactive user has time to notice the message and Ctrl-C the build,
> > > while an unattended install eventually proceeds?
> > 
> > That would work for me.
> 
> What does everyone think of this patch?

Pause is not good.  It doesn't scale with system speed, it doesn't
parallelize, who looks at build logs interactively anyway, except
to get annoyed by the fact that it's still not done yet?

This whole issue is getting more and more abstruse, ever since it
was decided that the version should contain the git string, but at
the same time autoconf should not rerun upon each version string
change.

In the medium to long run, Autoconf should be changed to not depend
at autoconf run time upon a volatile version string.  For example,

  AC_VERSION_STRING_FILE([.version])

could have semantics so that .version is read each time configure
is run.  That would mean that the configure script itself doesn't
contain the version string (if this macro is used), but I think
that is an acceptable compromise.  (Automake could let the .version
file be a config.status dependency automatically, of course.)

I suppose then people will be upset that configure is rerun upon
each version string change.  I don't know how to prevent that,
though.  But at least with --config-cache it shouldn't take all
that long.

That being said, I don't care much whether your patch is put in
place as an intermediate measure.

BTW, why are you removing autom4te.cache?  Working around some bug?

Cheers,
Ralf

> From: Eric Blake <address@hidden>
> Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 08:34:59 -0600
> Subject: [PATCH] GNUmakefile: pause after warning messages
> 
> * top/GNUmakefile (_curr-ver): Pause to allow time to read warning
> messages.  Split version update rules...
> (version): ...into a target.
> Suggested by Joel E. Denny.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Eric Blake <address@hidden>