Re: distcheck and canonical_*

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello,

* NightStrike wrote on Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 02:55:09PM CET:
> When doing a make distcheck, why is for instance the --host option not
> propagated to configure without explicitly setting
> DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS?

The default INSTALL file recommends just running
  ./configure
  make
  make install

without further options.  The Autoconf manual documents, as basic
statement, running ./configure without options.  The implicit assumption
engraved into autotools is that a plain ./configure works "most of the
time".

As such, distcheck, the test which aims to help ensure that your package
is suitable for the average user, should just invoke that plain
configure.  The way you have set up the package in your developer build
tree may have little to with that, be that --host or
--enable-maintainer-mode arguments.

So yes, the fact that arguments are not propagated from configure to
distcheck by default, could be called a feature.

Hope that helps.  If you need --host by default on your system, I
suggest you install on it a config.site file that sets host_alias;
if your package needs some settings for distcheck to work by default,
then you can use DISTCHECK_CONFIGURE_FLAGS.

Cheers,
Ralf