Part of the reason behind maintainer mode is that it often takes "esoteric" software to rebuild platform-independent files, like automake, bison, etc. Eliding the dependency on those allows source distributions to offer pre-built files and avoid the neccessity of the end user installing such tools. Even when the files are pre-built in the source archive, there may be timestamp issues that trigger an attempt to rebuild anyway.
So, thus was born maintainer mode. Maintainers are expected to go through the "hassle" of installing various bits of esoteric software to satisfy the true dependencies, while the end users are spared such hassle. _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user