Robert Collins wrote:
On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 17:27 -0700, K. Richard Pixley wrote:
My question today is... is there any hope of bringing automake
generated
Makefiles back into line with the GNU coding standards so that these
applications will work once again?
Use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE in your package; this will disable the rules to
rebuild Makefile.in etc unless --enable-maintainer-mode is supplied by
the user.
Seems to me that this should be the default. Only a maintainer should
even be interested in regenerationg Makefile.in's automagically. As is,
typical builders, (ie, not maintainers), are required to install
automake in order to build packages requiring automake.
AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is good to know about, thank you. But it doesn't
really solve the problem for users. Now if generated makefiles could
have those rules turned off using a command line and/or environment
variable, that might be useful. Then we could build packages without
automake, so long as we had AM_MAINTAINER_MODE=no in our environment.
But again, I'd argue that it was the maintainers who should set the
variable and that the default should be no dependency on automake.
Of course, you can't do the conditional thing easily without resorting
to GNU make extensions, so we'd likely lose the ability to build with a
v7 make program.
--rich
