Re: Bootstrapping from cvs

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Tom Tromey <address@hidden>
> Date: 16 Sep 2002 12:27:03 -0600
> 
> Paul> What I usually do is check out a fresh copy of the Autoconf
> Paul> sources from CVS.  That way, they'll have the proper time
> Paul> stamps.
> 
> This didn't work for me yesterday.  Or this morning.
> Could you try it?

Ack!  It doesn't work for me now either, since configure.ac is newer
than lib/Makefile.in in the CVS repository, as of September 13.  There
are similar problems with other files.

I can't eaily fix this particular problem, since the latest CVS
Automake (which is required by Autoconf) doesn't work for me.  :-)

I suppose that Akim could fix it for this particular case, but I'd
rather have a more systematic solution.  Simply touching "out of date"
files isn't right, as the out-of-date files are quite often wrong.

I don't offhand see a simple solution to the problem, but here are
some possible workarounds:

* Write a script that automatically checks that the CVS timestamps are
  consistent, and that updates the CVS repository if the timestamps
  are inconsistent.  Encourage maintainers to run this script after
  checking in files.

* Have subversions generate a new tarball after every CVS checkin or
  group of checkins.  E.g., after a checkin wait for (say) 20
  consecutive minutes of no checkins, and then generate a new tarball.
  If the new tarball can't be generated, send email to everybody who
  checked in something since the last successful tarball.

The latter method is more ambitious but would be more reliable.  Under
either method, the CVS repository might be temporarily inconsistent,
but we have that problem now anyway.