On Thu, 28 Aug 2003, Norman Gray wrote:
> (i) Force all of us to use the current versions of the autotools?
> No. Even though I better understand the problems with the check-em-in
> school, the keep-em-out problems still sound worse.
>
> (ii) Revert to old versions?
> I could possibly alter the moggy things so that I wasn't using the
> AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro in the configure.ac, so that the result was
> processable by older versions of autotools. But that's daft -- I
> don't know what effect that would have on the configuration, and
> even if it did still work now, there's no guarantee that thing
> would continue to work in future. Also, this isn't really solving
> the general problem, merely evading it in this case. So no, I
> think.
>
> (iii) Make sure we remove system autotools from our paths
> Though it might be a fuss, initially, this might be most reliable.
> They're in /usr/bin, so this would involve deinstalling the autoconf,
> automake and libtool RPMs, and either installing them elsewhere,
> if they're relocatable, or just building and installing them by
> hand in a non-default place (what I've done). If there are _no_
> autotools in the path, then the `missing' script can do its work
> successfully, and this problem disappears.
>
> (iv) Use a post-update script to finagle the timestamps
> This is one of the solutions the automake manual suggests. The
> GCC script they're referring to is, I think, GCC's
> contrib/gcc_update[2]. That particular script is customised for
> that build tree. I think we could get away with a more generic
> one which knew what things depended on what. This feels slightly
> dodgy, though.
Hi Norman,
of the above only (ii) or (iv) have any appeal at all. Otherwise as an end
user, just trying to quickly build this package, you're asking far too
much of me. After all there are loads of packages I can (and have) just
typed "./configure;make" without any of these issues having to enter the
process.
Cheers,
Peter.
(p.s. I'm unclear if this should still be the case or not, but a fresh
checkout still breaks the same way as yesterday).
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