Hi Bob,
On 13/1/21 12:35 am, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
On Tue, 12 Jan 2021, Peter Johansson wrote:
The problem is that there is no dependency in the Makefile telling
that autoconf need to be rerun when the version has changed. Automake
has the variable 'CONFIGURE_DEPENDENCIES' for this purpose, so adding
CONFIGURE_DEPENDENCIES = ChangeLog
would solve the issue but will cause a rerun of autoconf every time
you touch ChangeLog. Rather you want a stamp file, whose timestamp
only changes when the output of 'version.sh packageversion' changes.
Something along the lines:
$(srcdir)/.version: ChangeLog
cd $(srcdir) && ./version packageversion > .version-tmp &&
move-if-change .version-tmp .version
EXTRA_DIST = $(srcdir)/.version
I don't see any way without a specific file holding the timestamp on
when the version was last updated.
This is very helpful advice (and adds to valuable advice offered in
private emails by others). I don't really like hidden files but I do
have a version.h header file which could already be used for this
purpose. The version.h header file is currently produced from
version.h.in using config.status and it gets copied to the source
directory (if necessary) if the file has changed.
I think that will have the unwanted effect that autoconf is triggered
when building from a tarball. Since version.h is not included in the
tarball, it will be built by the user and have a newer timestamp than
configure, and hence the rule is triggered. I think the advice one of
the automake maintainers (probably Ralf) gave many years ago is that
files listed in CONFIGURE_DEPENDENCIES should be distributed.
Peter
