Mail Archives: cygwin/2002/12/01/19:39:07
Lapo got me started. "Blame" him ;-)...
Charles Wilson <cwilson AT ece DOT gatech DOT edu> wrote in
news:3DEA4653 DOT 10401 AT ece DOT gatech DOT edu:
>>
>> The client machine shouldn't need autotools or the know-how to use
>> them, right?
>
> Not necessarily. If configure.in doesn't have AM_MAINTAINER_MODE,
> then the default behavior is for all of the "maintainer rules" to be
> active all the time. That means configure searches for automake,
> autoconf, etc. and uses them to rebuild the infrastructure if
> necessary. Now, even if the maint-mode rules never get invoked,
> during *configure* you might get "test" invocations -- and it looks
> like those test invocations are failing.
Autotools are SO broken, and been for so long. Yeah. This is why I go into
hyperrant mode.
Lapo, the behavior you expect might be considered reasonable. But the ptb
at Autotools Central have decreed that providing some theoretical package
maintainer "Joe Blow" with the ability to update his package with one hand
on the wheel while eating a sandwich and watching "Attack of the Clones"
with 65% of his attention, was more important than preserving that
principle (that Autotool Build Configurations should be robust and
transparent for the end user, and that as Point One the user won't have to
install Autotools herself).
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is the Autotools ptb retroactive bandaid applied instead
of recognizing that 'automation' had been allowed to run amok in Autotools
and a huge step "backward" needed to be taken. Mostly I think it is the
fault of Automake which needed the Autotools structure to be
distorted, warped for it to have the 'hooks' it needed in order to work the
way it (theoretically) does. The disfiguring of Autoconf, by this unhappy
marriage with Automake, is pretty horrific.
I commmend you for putting effort into learning Autotools. As Gandalf says
at one point, "it isn't comfortable knowledge [the lore of the Rings of
Power]". Of course he also says "study not too deeply the arts and devices
of the Enemy." Not that any individuals at AutoTools are our "Enemy"; Chuck
and others here have in fact got considerable amounts of code they've
written in Autotools by now. But I still cannot shake the feeling I am
confronted with something warped and a bit malevolent, when I contemplate
Autotools.
At the very LEAST, something that does what AM_MAINTAINER_MODE causes,
should have been the *default* for all autotool'd packages, and only by
significant contortions should it have been made possible to cause all that
"default" behavior to get activated. But instead it's the other way around,
and users are at the mercy of package maintainers' ignorance or awareness
of the importance of (at the very MINIMUM) placing AM_MAINTAINER_MODE in
their configuration file.
Soren A
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