[sane-devel] Autotools generated files and CVS

[Julien BLACHE]

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

Hi,

> Acknowledged.  It may even be a better approach as several Linux
> distributions have a habit of running autoreconf --force before that
> build (and for a good reason).  Putting the "hack" in configure makes
> at least sure they pick up on it.

"well deserved" :)

> This can be worked around by checking ltmain.sh's version.  When an
> untested version is detected configure can output a warning like it
> does now when it thinks you already have the sane-backends installed.

Yes, that's some code to write, but it's a needed safeguard.

> Maintainer mode can be turned off.  It can even be turned off by
> default if one prefers to run maintainer tools by hand.  Running these

Yes I know, I've been adding the required AM_MAINTAINER_MODE to
configure.in for years now :)

> tool by hand may require a fair bit of autofoo knowledge.

The maintainer mode requires even more knowledge to get out of trouble
when it shits in its pants. Which happens pretty much every time the
damn thing tries to outsmart the user.

>> 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.
>
> Sorry, I use Debian ;-P

Thankfully our libtool maintainers over the years have worked hard to
save us from all that crap. They've battled with upstream a lot to get
to something saner.

> We can make maintainer mode an opt-in and keep bootstrapping limited
> to clean checkouts.

That should always be the default, anyway.

JB.

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