Re: first time automaking question

[Steve M. Robbins]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 02:15:24PM -0500, Sean Finney wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 09:34:48AM +0200, Alexandre Duret-Lutz wrote:
> > >>> "Sean" == Sean Finney <address@hidden> writes:
> >  Sean> - ./configure now tests for auto* and makeinfo
> > 
> >  Sean> is that really necessary?  
> > 
> > Yes.  Automake create Makefiles that know how to rerun the auto*
> > tools when necessary.  So configure check for them.
> 
> does this introduce any problems if the target machine doesn't
> have (or has ancient versions of) auto*?  or, if the auto* isn't
> found, does it just not implement said functionality?

Yes and no.  You can run into trouble if the target machine has a
different version (older OR newer!) of autoconf or automake.  Mostly
this is due to a badly-written macro which is, sadly, rather common.

However, if *no* autotools are detected, updating the Makefile.in or
configure file just doesn't happen, as you suspected.  

You can completely disable these "maintainer rules" in the
*distributed* makefiles via the AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro.  Look it up
in the automake docs.

-S

-- 
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