Re: Use of automake & friends vs. just running configure
Scott James Remnant <scott@netsplit.com> writes:
> 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.
> Upstream should ship without this macro, it makes lives for most end-
> users much easier -- they change the Makefile.am and either the package
> gets updated or a warning is issued that it couldn't be.
I disagree, as someone who's done a lot of those changes and had to deal
with packages that do this. The package invariably finds the completely
wrong version of Automake and they proceeds to eat itself in a horribly
messy fashion. It doesn't help that there are something like four
different, mutually incompatible versions of Automake all in active use by
various packages.
If I modify Makefile.am, I'm capable of running automake myself. It's the
only way, in practice, to get the right version.
Now if we ever reach the nirvana where all the different versions of
Automake are actually compatible with each other and do the right thing,
I'd change my mind, but we're so not there yet.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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