[sane-devel] Autotools generated files and CVS

[Julien BLACHE]

Olaf Meeuwissen <olaf.meeuwissen at avasys.jp> wrote:

Hi,

> Not doing so will make for a lot of big commits.

And? What's the point? As long as the build system updates are
self-contained and not mixed with other changes in the tree, we
couldn't care less.

> As we also discussed maintaining our changes to ltmain.sh as a patch,
> initial checkouts need to be bootstrapped anyway, so that patch gets
> applied *before* you `./configure`.  If we will require a bootstrap
> anyway, we might as well put the autofoo stuff in there too.

There's nothing preventing us from adding the patching within
configure. It's a hack, but then the whole "let's use our own libtool"
is a hack too.

But that point is really moot, because patching libtool without
knowing the libtool version that's in use and is going to get patched
is foolish and a sure way to shoot yourself in the feet (both of them,
with the quad damage, so you'll be glad if there's a piece of one knee
left after that).

> Once working with an autotooled build system, the Makefile's are
> pretty good about updating derived files so there is not that much

If you are speaking of the fucking maintainer mode that is on by
default, then "pretty good" doesn't read the same in my book. This
thing is royal pain in the ass, it's dogslow and it fails more often
than not, leaving your tree in a broken state you cannot recover from
without some major kicking.

> autofoo one has to know.  As for the amount of pain involved, I can
> only think of the time it takes.  Julien mentions versioning issues
> and broken deployment but I have little experience with that.

You obviously never had to work with broken libtool versions, which is
about every libtool version until something like 3 years ago, and even
then, there have been some pretty broken versions after that too.

If going with automake means we have to put up with the maintainer
mode crap and bootstrapping the build system after every pull, then
thanks, but no thanks, I'm keeping the current one.

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169