On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:10:51 -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:
> > For other
> > projects one cannot build from a scm checkout without running scripts,
> > such as autogen.sh where one would need to reproduce the upstream
> > development env.
>
> Where is the reference on that BTW. There was a time in the past when
> someone asked me what they should do before generating their tarballs
> and I told them to just tar it up and go, and I had every intention of
> running autogen.sh myself during the build process. Then someone told
> me "No, they need to run autogen.sh before they make the tarball". So,
> why is that? Why shouldn't the sources be autogen'ed against our
> specific dev environment, after all we will be the ones building our
> rpms in our build environment, so it would seem to make sense to me.
> Obviously I must be missing something of great importance...
It's related to the reason why we have multiple auto{conf,make} versions
in the distribution. You need to pick the set of tools that is compatible
with the rest of the source build setup. Sometimes errors force you to run
a specific older or newer(!) version than what you can choose from. Or
errors make you patch the configure.{ac,in} and closely related files
before you can set up the source at all. That alone may be quite some work
for several projects. Further, there have been silent incompatibilities
before, which break configuration of the source, because you generate a
build environment which differs from upstream. The errors may be subtle,
which aren't trivial to track down in thousands of generated lines of
typical "configure" scripts or aclocal.m4 files. Or, what seems to autogen
for you today breaks tomorrow in a completely unexpected and weird way,
and at an unfortunate point of time, only because your upgraded autotools
reveal a sleeping incompatibility.
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