From: Alexandre Oliva (oliva@dcc.unicamp.br)
Date: Sat Jan 09 1999 - 06:50:52 EST
On Jan 9, 1999, Godmar Back <gback@cs.utah.edu> wrote:
> Even though I didn't do anything but update my tree and try to
> configure (in a totally different tree!), cvs -n update -d shows this:
You must have done something other than just running configure.
Automake creates makefiles that will automatically update the
configure script, the Makefiles, as well as any configure-generated
file, if any of these appears to be out-of-date. IMO, this is good,
otherwise you may end up using stale versions of the makefiles and of
config.h.
The drawback is that, when a Makefile.in is updated with a different
version of automake, CVS will consider it different.
Some packages (such as Amanda and libtool) adopt the policy of not
maintaining autoconf/automake files in CVS. In this case, all
developers must have a working version of autoconf and automake.
Others, such as egcs, autoconf and automake, keep all these files in
the CVS tree, and there is a recommended version of autoconf and
automake for people who're going to check in changes for generated
files.
I personally prefer the first alternative, as it reduces the amount of
commits, and it avoids the CVS timestamping problem, but I could go on
with either one.
> However, I did not touch any of the Makefile.in that it says I've changed.
> How can that happen.
They appeared to be older than configure.in or Makefile.am, that's why
they were rebuilt. You start to appreciate it after you get used to
it: after you edit a Makefile.am or configure.in, you just have to run
`make' to get everything updated as needed. Really convenient.
But there's another option: this can be controlled with an automake
macro, namely, AM_MAINTAINER_MODE. It creates the
--enable-maintainer-mode configure option, that enables automatic
updates of auto*-generated files. It's currently deprecated, because
people found it to frequentely lead to inconsistencies due to
out-of-date files, but it still works. I'd rather not use it, but if
you really find automatic modification of Makefile.ins unacceptable,
we could use it.
> And I'm still not able to build it!
Remove all Makefile.ins and configure scripts, cvs update and try
again.
> Please convince me that automake is good thing.
I think only time will do that. I know how it feels, when you start
to get used to something that's different from what you're used to,
and you don't really understand what are the benefits of it; I've
lived that myself.
However, as soon as I learned what to expect from automake, I started
to appreciate it very much, and to miss it in packages that haven't
adopted it.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva aoliva@{acm.org}
oliva@{dcc.unicamp.br,gnu.org,egcs.cygnus.com,samba.org}
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil
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