Re: question re: %configure

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

> On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 08:07:56AM +0200, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've noticed that %configure runs libtoolize when it doesn't find 
> > configure.in in the tarball.
> > I suppose if that's in the macro then that's considered the right thing to 
> > do. I  was wondering why exactly it does that, if it's actually better or 
> > not to do it, or if I'm better off specifying my own configure line ?
> 
> Heh. Here's why libtoolize is in %configure:
> 
> A long time ago an arm port was attempted, and the arm arches were not known
> to deployed config.guess. So libtoolize was added to %configure in order
> to copy in arm-aware versions of config.guess/config.sub.


Whoah - that's a surprising answer ;) So, basically, it's still in there 
for an arch that's not supported anyway ? So, for normal packages, it 
serves no purpose whatsoever ?

As a side note : why doesn't it check specifically for config.guess then ?

> > If it is better, then I'll just change all my specs and add
> > BuildRequires: libtool
> 
> Maybe. There's a certain core set of functionality provided by the
> build system that Red Hat packages don't bother tracking, e.g.
> cc/make/as/ls etc.  libtoolize is arguably a member of that set.

Well, I'm currently working on a system to set up clean build roots for 
any dist and then build rpms in it, so I'm finding out everything you need 
for rpm builds the hard way ;) 
It's starting to work out pretty well and I'll announce it here, since I 
think it's a useful tool for generating good packages.

I didn't realize libtoolize was considered standard for package building, 
I always considered libtool to be in the autotools space, used for going 
from cvs stuff to dist tarballs.

> > but before I do that I wanted to know if this is necessary or not.
> 
> It depends :-)

Well, hm ... I thought that there was some other benefit on regular archs 
from running libtoolize.  If that's not the case, then I think my best bet 
is to do my own configure instead of %configure, no ?

Please feel free to correct me if I miss anything.  While I have become 
sort of friends with the regular autotools, libtool and I still don't 
understand each other very well.

Thomas


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