On 2025-09-13 15:17:07 -0600, Karl Berry wrote: > Having something that works with any 3rd-party project is difficult, > > I thought you were talking about your own projects. Since no one but > you has ever asked for this, as far as I can recall, evidently the rest > of the world is not in dire need of this feature. It's been a problem > since day one of automake, so presumably everyone who cares has already > dealt with it.
Or perhaps they haven't noticed the issue, until one focuses on the version one actually has. For instance, see https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=882842#10 > From what I can easily see, other packages handle this by getting the > files they want in their bootstrap script and not using --add-missing > (usually), or replacing the files it installs (gettext). Bootstrap scripts often do something like "autoreconf -i" + some other things. This has the effect to invoke automake with --add-missing. For instance, GNU Screen has an autogen.sh script with #!/bin/sh exec autoreconf --install rm -rf autom4te.cache > Looking at the code for --add-missing in automake, it seems far from > simple to me. I see no good way to make (yet another) special case for > texinfo.tex. If the file is texinfo.tex, the pathname given by kpsewhich could be used instead of $libdir/$file; alternatively, one could assume that texinfo has been installed under the same prefix as automake (which is the case of typical Linux distributions). In any case, check that the file exists before actually choosing it. I've noticed that for config.guess and config.sub, Debian overrides the files provided by automake: # remove automake's versions rm -f $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/automake-$(version)/config.sub rm -f \ $(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr/share/automake-$(version)/config.guess in debian/rules, and usr/share/misc/config.guess usr/share/automake-1.17/config.guess usr/share/misc/config.sub usr/share/automake-1.17/config.sub in debian/automake.links, which gives lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 2025-03-22 18:36:01 /usr/share/automake-1.17/config.guess -> ../misc/config.guess lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 2025-03-22 18:36:01 /usr/share/automake-1.17/config.sub -> ../misc/config.sub (these files are provided by another package, autotools-dev, and obtained from https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/config/). So perhaps this is to be left to the distribution. -- Vincent Lefèvre <[email protected]> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <https://www.vinc17.net/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Pascaline project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
