Jeff and all,
my 0.02 US$ ...
- autogen.pl was recently used with v1.10 on a PowerPC Little Endian arch
(that was mandatory since the libtool we use to generate v1.10 series do
not yet support PPC LE)
- if we remove (from the tarball) autogen.pl, should we also remove
configure.ac ?
and what about m4 files and Makefile.am ?
- an alternative to removing autogen.pl (from the tarball) is to have
autogen.pl
test repo_rev and/or tarball_version from VERSION so we can detect if
autogen.pl is ran
from a tarball. in that case, we could fail with a message such as
"you might not want to do that, but if you really do, re-run
autogen.pl with the --force parameter"
Cheers,
Gilles
On 10/28/2015 5:21 AM, Jeff Squyres (jsquyres) wrote:
Yo Brian Barrett: cast your brain into the WayBack(tm) machine...
Do you remember why we include autogen.pl in distribution tarballs?
My recollection is:
1. It was handy for OMPI developers to "make dist" in a SVN checkout to take a tarball
over to back-end machine where you couldn't do an SVN checkout. In short: including autogen.* in
the tarball (and all of its machinery) makes "make dist" tarballs that are functional for
an OMPI developer.
2. We wanted to be friendly to 3rd-party vendors who have their own out-of-tree
plugins. They can take an official release tarball, add their components into
the source tree, run autogen, and be good to go.
3. It seemed like the Right Thing to do.
----
The question came up today on the weekly call for obscure reasons... not worth describing
here. But it raised the question, "Is there a reason we include autogen.pl in the
tarball?"
I dug in history, and I see that autogen.sh was added here:
https://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/ompi/changeset/17505
It cited the wrong Trac ticket, but I found that, too:
https://svn.open-mpi.org/trac/ompi/ticket/1205
Neither of them really talks much about *why* we added autogen.sh to the
tarball.
FWIW:
The switch from SVN ti Git may obviate #1.
#2 hasn't really ever occurred. Although it could happen in the future,
3rd-party vendors can just grab from github at the right Git tag, too.
#3 ...shrug.
Do you have a memory of a stronger reason than #3 to keep autogen.pl in the
tarball?
(I don't have a super strong opinion either way, I think -- perhaps 51% in
favor of removing it from the tarball, simply because we do occasionally get
the user on us...@open-mpi.org who runs autogen.pl for no reason, and then runs
into problems because they've got old Autotools)
