Re: Bootstrapping from cvs

[Jim Meyering]

Hi guys!

The CVS folks found a way around this.
Their current repository has a file called noautomake.sh in it,
and the INSTALL file says this:

1)  Some combinations of Automake and Autoconf versions may break the CVS build
    if file timestamps aren't set correctly, so you may wish to run
    noautomake.sh to set the timestamps and avoid attempting to run the
    autotools on your system, especially if you are building from source
    checked out from CVS:

        $ ./noautomake.sh --noautoconf

    The CVS Makefiles and configure script were built using Automake 1.5 and
    Autoconf 2.13, respectively.  Other combinations of autotool versions may
    or may not work.

I recently went through this exercise to make our private version of
cvs build after a fresh check-out.  In order to do so, I tried using
the above script, but it didn't work.  There are a couple of other
dependencies in the case of cvs that were causing automake and autoconf
to be rerun, so I added these two lines:

 if $autoconf; then :; else
        find . -name 'stamp-h?.in' -exec touch {} \;
+       find . -name 'options.h.in' -exec touch {} \;
+       find . -name 'config.h.in' -exec touch {} \;
 fi

Here's the complete file (I will check in the above change to
the official CVS repo this week):

noautomake.sh
Description: Text Data

Caveat: I made no effort to make the script general.
IMHO, this script (or something like it) belongs in autoconf and/or automake.

Akim Demaille <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>>> "Tom" == Tom Tromey <address@hidden> writes:
>
> Tom> I suggest we use AM_MAINTAINER_MODE.  I know this is not always
> Tom> popular, but I think autoconf is a special case.  It is one of
> Tom> the few tools that has this bootstrapping problem.
>
> Akim> Really, I'm against it.

Same here.  I'm ashamed to be the one who perpetrated
that, er, ... (lets be charitable :-) short-cut.
Sure, it's hard to do these things right, but we (of all people!)
should do our best to set a good example.

> Tom> How do you check out and build a new set of auto*?
>
> I have no problems :(  I'm ready to make it easier, but I don't know
> what problem you have :(
>
> I can guess one though: Autoconf 2.54 requires 2.54, and CVS
> Autoconf requires 2.54.  Therefore, if the timestamps are broken,
> you'll have the problem of trying to setup CVS Autoconf with itself,
> which fails.
>
> I suggest installing 2.54 from its tarball.
>
> Tom> I really can't get it to work.  I'm looking at spending another
> Tom> hour, again, digging into this.  It's really quite frustrating.
>
> Yes, I understand this :(  But AM_MAINTAINER_MODE is still the wrong
> track.  What we need is to find a means to fix the behavior of CVS wrt
> timestamps.  Gary seems to have a few ideas.