[Fedora-directory-devel] Why is there a Makefile in CVS?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 06:20 -0600, Richard Megginson wrote:
> Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> > Why is there a Makefile (not Makefile.in) in CVS?
> >   
> Makefile is there for historical reasons and will be removed asap.

Great, thanks.

> > Isn't the first thing we want to do (on a checkout) a ./configure, which
> > will replace this file anyway?
> >
> > Likewise, I'm confused:  why do we allow prefix and exec_prefix to be
> > specified at 'make' (rather than configure) time?
> You can set them at configure time.  I use "configure 
> --prefix=/home/rich/11srv && make install" for testing.
> > This is typically at
> > configure time in other open source projects.
> Actually, it is a "feature" of autoconf/automake to allow you to set 
> them at make time, in addition to being able to set them at configure 
> time.  It is my understanding that autoconf/automake work fine, no 
> matter if you set them at configure or make time.  From "info autoconf":
> "Most of these variables have values that rely on `prefix' or
> `exec_prefix'.  It is deliberate that the directory output variables
> keep them unexpanded: typically `@datadir@' will be replaced by
> `${prefix}/share', not `/usr/local/share'.
> 
>    This behavior is mandated by the GNU coding standards, so that when
> the user runs:
> 
> `make'
>      she can still specify a different prefix from the one specified to
>      `configure', in which case, if needed, the package shall hard code
>      dependencies corresponding to the make-specified prefix.
> 
> `make install'
>      she can specify a different installation location, in which case
>      the package _must_ still depend on the location which was compiled
>      in (i.e., never recompile when `make install' is run).  This is an
>      extremely important feature, as many people may decide to install
>      all the files of a package grouped together, and then install
>      links from the final locations to there.
> ...
> "
> 
> There is more in the autoconf info doc about this too.

Yikes.  That's very interesting.  Can't blame GNU for lacking
features :-)

> > Changing this would seem
> > to remove some additional complexity from the build system...
> >   
> What additional complexity is introduced?

It was this bit in Makefile.am that seems odd to me:

# these are for the config files and scripts that we need to generate
and replace
# the paths and other tokens with the real values set during
configure/make
# note that we cannot just use AC_OUTPUT to do this for us, since it
will do things like this:
# LD_LIBRARY_PATH = ${prefix}/lib/fedora-ds
# i.e. it literally copies in '${prefix}' rather than expanding it out -
we want this instead:
# LD_LIBRARY_PATH = /usr/lib/fedora-ds
if BUNDLE
fixupcmd = sed \
        -e 's, at bindir\@,$(bindir),g' \
        -e 's, at sbindir\@,$(sbindir),g' \


-- 
Andrew Bartlett
http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Red Hat Inc.                  http://redhat.com

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