Re: Staging broken.

[David Kastrup]

Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> writes:

>> > I think it's easier if we give up on intelligence here, and just
>> > recommend ccache.
>>
>> That does not seem like much of a help for the problem case at hand.
>
>
> Autoconf tries to leave the config.h alone, using content based checks.
>
> I assume it does this because touching config.h triggers an expensive
> global recompile in timestamp-based build systems, like make.
>
> Our GNUmakefile tries to detect changes to config.h.in using timestamps,
> but autconf (see above) won't overwrite the file unless it really changed,
> so the default doesn't do the right thing.
>
> Our comment says:
>
> # this is to prevent people from getting
> # undefined symbols  when we add them to config.h.in,
> # and they blindly run "cvs update; make".
>
> the mention of CVS shows you how old this comment is.
>
> My proposal is to have configure always regenerate config.h, because
> ccache makes the full rebuild almost free, so we don't need configure's
> cleverness.

The fix I proposed would be the complicated way to achieve that.
Probably simpler is calling autoconf with the option --force in
autogen.sh.

Maybe that is what we should recommend instead in the Makefile instructions.

-- 
David Kastrup