Peter,

On Monday, November 3, 2003, at 04:42 PM, Peter W. Draper wrote:

> Personally I don't consider requiring GNU tool installations to be 
> quite
> the same as "portable", although its clear some do now.

Do you mean the issue of automake, the `missing' tool, and checked-in 
generated files?

I think it might be best if we thrash this out in the next face-to-face 
meeting we have, but my brief description of the issue is this.

The distributed source tarball would not depend on any build tools, 
because it must not.  Those hardy souls working with a CVS checkout 
will probably need some mild extra setup.  They'd probably have to have 
extra setup in any case, in order to bootstrap the system.

It seems preferable to include some generated files (ie, configure and 
Makefile.in, but not Makefile) in the repository.  This does feel 
nasty, but it seems to turn out that the alternatives involve even 
nastier version-skew problems.

However, if a change in configure.ac (changing comments, say) results 
in an unchanged configure, then the unchanged configure is not updated 
in the repository, so that the file configure.ac ends up being _newer_ 
than configure when the result is checked out; thus the makefiles think 
that configure has to be remade.  If (i) you have up-to-date autotools 
then configure is regenerated (redundantly, in fact, remember), no 
problem; if (ii) you have _no_ autotools then a script `missing' is run 
which simply touches the `generated' file, keeping the makefiles happy; 
but if (iii) you have _old_ autotools (unfortunately the most common 
case, since you probably have rather old autotools installed by your 
Linux distribution), then the makefiles try to use them, possibly 
failing, if the configure.ac or Makefile.am uses newish features.  I've 
addressed the problem in autoastrom by customising the `missing' 
script, and suggested fixes to the automake list.  The end result is 
that the _first_ time you run make on a checked-out or updated 
autoastrom you have to set a variable.  There is no need to do that in 
the case of distributed source sets.

Peter's contention is, I think, that such a special case is 
unreasonable, even for folk working with the CVS source set; I believe 
it is reasonable for this group, and in any case there's no way of 
avoiding it.

Do we want to talk about this now, or postpone it to the next meeting, 
when we could talk about the whole business of CVS, building and 
distribution.  I don't suppose either Tim or Brad will be there, no?  
We could go all über-techie and do a videocon, of course....

See you,

Norman


-- 
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Norman Gray                   http://www.astro.gla.ac.uk/users/norman/
Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow    [log in to unmask]