On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 21:09 +0200, Francesco Paolo Lovergine wrote: > On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 07:36:07PM +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote: > > On Tue, 2004-09-07 at 16:31 +0200, Francesco P. Lovergine wrote: > > > > > Convincing upstreams to use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro with automake helps. > > > > > That would be wrong. > > > End users do not change Makefile.am or any other file like that, because > they are indeed end users, not developers. *snip* > Any developer with a minimum of brain in its head knows > --enable-maintainer-mode and knows how to change properly things in > autotools scripts. > So when a user does, for whatever reason, end up changing Makefile.am (they might be applying a patch, or just muddling about) they *don't* have this developer knowledge so wouldn't get a dependable build. That's why it's a bad default, it optimises for intelligence rather than stupidity and there's rather more of the latter in the world :-( To quote from the Automake documentation: Several years ago François Pinard pointed out several arguments against `AM_MAINTAINER_MODE'. Most of them relate to insecurity. By removing dependencies you get non-dependable builds: change to sources files can have no effect on generated files and this can be very confusing when unnoticed. He adds that security shouldn't be reserved to maintainers (what `-- enable-maintainer-mode' suggests), on the contrary. If one user has to modify a `Makefile.am', then either `Makefile.in' should be updated or a warning should be output (this is what Automake uses `missing' for) but the last thing you want is that nothing happens and the user doesn't notice it (this is what happens when rebuild rules are disabled by `AM_MAINTAINER_MODE'). There is a good suggestion that AM_MAINTAINER_MODE should be built-in, but with the defaults *reversed*, so that those developers with brains in their heads can --disable-maintainer-mode if they want. > Instead they are confused and upset by cryptical errors of autotools, > when new versions are not backcompatible as often (if not always) > Which recent (let's say the last 5 years) versions haven't been backwards compatible? If you've got an example, I'd like to see it so we can get a test case and fix that bug. Scott -- Have you ever, ever felt like this? Had strange things happen? Are you going round the twist?
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part