[Fedora-directory-devel] Re: Please review: [Bug 212098] Use autoconf to generate task perl script templates

[Howard Chu]

Howard Chu wrote:
> Welcome to autotools hell...
> 
> fedora-directory-devel-request at redhat.com wrote:
> 
>>> The real pain is when not all of the files have changed and you check 
>>> in only those that did. This can cause an unwanted auto* rebuild.
>>>
>>> I've taken to checking everything in at once whenever one thing 
>>> changes with:
>>>
>>> cvs ci -f Makefile.am configure.in aclocal.m4 Makefile.in configure
>>>
>>> This preserves the proper timestamp/dependency order (at least for me).
> 
> First: use a recent automake (1.9.x) that supports the 
> AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro, and use that in your configure.ac file. This 
> will turn off the automatic dependency checking/regeneration of the 
> Makefile/configure/etc scripts unless you explicitly ask for them (using 
> configure --enable-maintainer-mode). As a general rule, you don't want 
> maintainer mode enabled. It was stupid of them to make it the default 
> behavior but at least it's possible to turn it off now.

One more note - it will make your lives easier if you standardize on a 
single version of each tool, so that when you check in newly generated 
files the diffs will be small and meaningful. Otherwise you get a lot of 
noise, as Andrew already pointed out.

In the past we had things set up so that only a single maintainer was 
permitted to regenerate and check in configure script and associated 
files, to avoid the issue of having many tool versions in use. Also 
there were fixes in our blessed tool versions that the upstream 
maintainers hadn't rolled out yet, so we had to keep tarballs of the 
specific tools available for download as well.

I think we still have a minor patch in our autoconf tool that the 
upstream guys haven't adopted yet - redirecting stderr from the conftest 
programs into the logfile instead of /dev/null (which stock autoconf 
does), so that it's actually possible to diagnose why a config test 
fails. It never fails to amaze me how incredibly un-useful these tools 
are out of the box, and how long it takes to get them fixed.
-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc
   OpenLDAP Core Team            http://www.openldap.org/project/