On Mon, 11 Oct 2010, Ãvar ArnfjÃrà Bjarmason wrote: > On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 07:47, Michael J Gruber > <git@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > (CC-ing Jakub Narebski, who maintains configure.ac) I wouldn't say that I maintain it. I was one of people who started it, and I try to keep it from being too bitrotten, by asking to provide configure test when adding new configure knob to main Makefile. I am certainly not an expert on autoconf. > I don't like it. For one this would break build scripts that use `make > configure && ./configure && ...`. It's also annoying to have to set > some variable to *really* invoke a target that I just indicated I > *really* wanted by invoking it in the first place. > > Perhaps a @echo from the configure script itself indicating that it's > complimentary would be better. > > > For most software packages, untar-autoconf/make configure-configure-make > > is the preferred way to build the package; not so for Git. But the > > presence of the make target makes people believe so. > > Unlike in most packages autoconf is strictly complimentary for Git, > but it usually gives you much better results. Instead of the Makefile > guessing based on `uname -s` we actually check for features and set > the config.mak.autogen variables accordingly. That's why we have it, to be able to check for features, rather than guess based on operating system and its version. > So it's less likely to break on odd systems, and given that (as you > point out) mostly everyone has autoconf already recommending it as the > default would make more sense than the other way around. But thanks to having ./configure optional step, we can build git also on platforms that doesn't have autoconf installed (though the same could be achieved by bundling ./configure script with release tarballs). > >  ÂOn an annecdotical note: When I decided to switch to a dvcs, I failed building > >  ÂGit (with configure) and tried out hg instead. Imagine! > > What sort of failure? Has it been fixed since then? -- Jakub Narebski Poland -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html